It seems to me that there’s a tension at the heart of defining what the “purpose” of meetups is. On the one hand, the community aspect is one of the most valuable things one can get out of it—I love that I can visit dozens of cities across the US, and go to a Less Wrong meetup and instantly have stuff to talk about. On the other hand, a community cannot exist solely for its own sake. Someone’s personal interest in participating in the community will naturally fluctuate over time, and if everyone quits the moment their interest touches zero then nobody will ever feel like it’s worth investing in its long-term health.
Personally, I do have a sense that going to meetups matters, in that it helps (however marginally) to raise the sanity waterline in one’s local community, and to move important conversations about x-risk and the future of humanity into the mainstream. I myself was motivated to dive into Less Wrong again, after a hiatus of many years, by finding a lively meetup group that was discussing these ideas regularly.
In any case I think that the question of “why meetups matter” is something that we’re all collectively trying to figure out over time. I don’t claim to know the answer right now.
I do, however, have some concern about creating a “monoculture” among the various sub-groups. It’s good that we have a wide variety of intellectual interests, ways-of-running-meetups, etc., because this allows for mistakes to be corrected and innovations to be discovered. If we are all given a directive from on high[1] saying “We are going to mobilize all the resources of the Rationality Community towards goal X, which we will achieve by strategy Y,” then it might at first seem like a lot of stuff is getting done. But what if strategy Y is ineffective, or goal X is a bad goal? Then we would have ruined our chance to discover our mistake until it was too late. This is especially important when the goals of the community are so ill-defined, as is the case now.
Of course, in order to reap these benefits of having a diverse community, a prerequisite is that there be any communication at all between groups. So, the suggestion of having meetups write up blog posts for public consumption seems like a good one[2]. But I don’t think the groups should be told which topics they must discuss, because they might be interested in something else that nobody else would’ve thought of. Perhaps it’s enough to provide a list of topics that any meetup group can draw from if they can’t think of something. And maybe, after one group publishes a writeup, another group might be inspired to discuss the same topic later and submit their own writeup in response.
[1] Or, more realistically, a persuasive message to the effect of “All the cool kids are doing Z and you’re going to feel left out if you don’t,” which can feel like a compulsory directive because of Schelling points, etc.
[2] Caveat: The mood of a conversation is likely to change dramatically if it’s known that someone is taking notes that will be posted later, since then one is not speaking merely to those in attendance, but effectively to an indefinitely large audience of all LessWrong readers. So, I would recommend that meetups have a mixture of on- and off-the-record conversations, with a clear signal of which norm is in effect at any given time.
It seems to me that there’s a tension at the heart of defining what the “purpose” of meetups is. On the one hand, the community aspect is one of the most valuable things one can get out of it—I love that I can visit dozens of cities across the US, and go to a Less Wrong meetup and instantly have stuff to talk about. On the other hand, a community cannot exist solely for its own sake. Someone’s personal interest in participating in the community will naturally fluctuate over time, and if everyone quits the moment their interest touches zero then nobody will ever feel like it’s worth investing in its long-term health.
Personally, I do have a sense that going to meetups matters, in that it helps (however marginally) to raise the sanity waterline in one’s local community, and to move important conversations about x-risk and the future of humanity into the mainstream. I myself was motivated to dive into Less Wrong again, after a hiatus of many years, by finding a lively meetup group that was discussing these ideas regularly.
In any case I think that the question of “why meetups matter” is something that we’re all collectively trying to figure out over time. I don’t claim to know the answer right now.
I do, however, have some concern about creating a “monoculture” among the various sub-groups. It’s good that we have a wide variety of intellectual interests, ways-of-running-meetups, etc., because this allows for mistakes to be corrected and innovations to be discovered. If we are all given a directive from on high[1] saying “We are going to mobilize all the resources of the Rationality Community towards goal X, which we will achieve by strategy Y,” then it might at first seem like a lot of stuff is getting done. But what if strategy Y is ineffective, or goal X is a bad goal? Then we would have ruined our chance to discover our mistake until it was too late. This is especially important when the goals of the community are so ill-defined, as is the case now.
Of course, in order to reap these benefits of having a diverse community, a prerequisite is that there be any communication at all between groups. So, the suggestion of having meetups write up blog posts for public consumption seems like a good one[2]. But I don’t think the groups should be told which topics they must discuss, because they might be interested in something else that nobody else would’ve thought of. Perhaps it’s enough to provide a list of topics that any meetup group can draw from if they can’t think of something. And maybe, after one group publishes a writeup, another group might be inspired to discuss the same topic later and submit their own writeup in response.
[1] Or, more realistically, a persuasive message to the effect of “All the cool kids are doing Z and you’re going to feel left out if you don’t,” which can feel like a compulsory directive because of Schelling points, etc.
[2] Caveat: The mood of a conversation is likely to change dramatically if it’s known that someone is taking notes that will be posted later, since then one is not speaking merely to those in attendance, but effectively to an indefinitely large audience of all LessWrong readers. So, I would recommend that meetups have a mixture of on- and off-the-record conversations, with a clear signal of which norm is in effect at any given time.