Cambridge LW: Post-mortem

[benelliott]

A brief post-mortem of this weeks LW meet-up.

Topic Selection

This week we had comparatively few people, so what worked this time may not generalise. At the beginning of the meet-up Douglas suggested we use one of his meetup formats. Of the three, skill focus was not usable without preparation, and we voted for small discussions above competitive estimating. After a second vote, we used Douglas’ suggested method to decide a topic, rather than our method from last week.

This involved each writing down a suggested topic, revealing them all, and then after a fixed timer expired standing behind our preferred one with not further discussion. Using this method, we eventually agreed unanimously on first organising a LessWrong Punt trip, about which an e-mail should be sent to Cambridge, East Anglia and London LessWrongians, followed by a discussion of rational office politics, specifically whether and how it is worthwhile to attempt to achieve goals through exerting influence on large organisations.

Pre commitments

Once again all pre-commitments were kept, apparently with considerable difficulty on Adam’s part. More pre-commitments were made this week, which will once again be posted here to slightly increase the social cost of breaking them.

* Ramana: Send out punting e-mail

* Ben: Post write-up of meeting and continue keeping diary

* Adam: Full note production on courses.

[komponisto]

Please fix the spelling of mortem in the title.

[Alicorn]

Done.

[Douglas_Reay]

This involved each writing down a suggested topic, revealing them all, and then after a
fixed timer expired standing behind our preferred one with not further discussion. Using
this method, we eventually agreed unanimously on first organising a LessWrong Punt trip

I took a note of how long each part of the decision method took:

1. Write the topic titles down on napkins − 1 minute

2. Discuss what the topic titles meant and make alterations to them − 3 minutes

3. Decide between the proposed topic titles − 10 seconds

This substantially beats the 10+ minutes this process was taking.

We did, however, spend a while at the start of this meeting deciding which meeting format to use. It would be nice if we could pick a meeting format for the next meeting to default to unless changed before the next meeting starts. Maybe that can be done in a conditional manner such as: “If Ben has brought his diary notes, then XXX. Else, if 6+ people, then YYY. Else ZZZ.”