I’d potentially like to generate a default meetup topic for each month, so that lots of people all over are talking about the same thing at the same time. This could make discussion on both LessWrong (via the write-ups) and the Facebook group more focused, and thus hopefully move the community’s conversation around those topics forward (trying to avoid the failure mode of retreading the same ground).
I predict that this will be better the closer this is to “deeply consume content X” than “generate content X”. I also suspect something like… ‘retreading the same ground’ is actually good, in the context of meetups, so long that it’s on a sufficiently long schedule that there’s something new to come back to, and the content is ‘evergreen’ in the right way. (Specifically, meetups regularly have member turnover, such that you can’t all read the Sequences together in 2014 and then everyone knows the Sequences.)
It also might be neat if we could generate meetup-exclusive content, such that actually showing up in person gives you some access that you can’t get otherwise, adding some scarcity to (actually!) increase the value. But where that content will come from is, of course, an obstacle.
Yeah—retreading the same ground seems like a necessary and normal part of having a culture with common knowledge.
Creating new stuff is hard, and creating it as a group rather than working alone is an additional hard thing. This can often be at odds of the normal meetup goal of inclusiveness. The most cool new progress I’ve experienced at a meetup was in attacking epistemology problems (like the raven paradox), which kind of makes sense if we imagine that this sort of problem was hard because it was confusing, but not too complicated and not requiring much domain expertise outside the LW curriculum.
This point (from both Vaniver and Charlie) is well-taken—I definitely agree that some amount of retreading the same ground is fine and often necessary or useful. I guess what I meant to express was, if there are conversations people are having that contain potentially novel insights or interesting new ways of looking at a problem/topic, then it would be good if those were written up and added to the canon. By default this is almost never happening, so it’s the thing I want to encourage.
I predict that this will be better the closer this is to “deeply consume content X” than “generate content X”. I also suspect something like… ‘retreading the same ground’ is actually good, in the context of meetups, so long that it’s on a sufficiently long schedule that there’s something new to come back to, and the content is ‘evergreen’ in the right way. (Specifically, meetups regularly have member turnover, such that you can’t all read the Sequences together in 2014 and then everyone knows the Sequences.)
It also might be neat if we could generate meetup-exclusive content, such that actually showing up in person gives you some access that you can’t get otherwise, adding some scarcity to (actually!) increase the value. But where that content will come from is, of course, an obstacle.
Yeah—retreading the same ground seems like a necessary and normal part of having a culture with common knowledge.
Creating new stuff is hard, and creating it as a group rather than working alone is an additional hard thing. This can often be at odds of the normal meetup goal of inclusiveness. The most cool new progress I’ve experienced at a meetup was in attacking epistemology problems (like the raven paradox), which kind of makes sense if we imagine that this sort of problem was hard because it was confusing, but not too complicated and not requiring much domain expertise outside the LW curriculum.
This point (from both Vaniver and Charlie) is well-taken—I definitely agree that some amount of retreading the same ground is fine and often necessary or useful. I guess what I meant to express was, if there are conversations people are having that contain potentially novel insights or interesting new ways of looking at a problem/topic, then it would be good if those were written up and added to the canon. By default this is almost never happening, so it’s the thing I want to encourage.