I’m not sure how “official meetups” would be any different by nature of being “official” or even what official means. The idea also seems a bit strange to me because I don’t think the LessWrong.com team has any claim of being an official arbiter on the term LessWrong.
LessWrong Germany e.V. is a NGO with a 5-figure yearly budget.
It seems to me that an individual toastmasters club has a lot less license to innovate then our local meetup has. A toastmasters club can’t say: “Let’s run this marathon together under the logo of our club.” but our local meetup would have no problem with running a marathon together as an LessWrong team.
It seems to me like making a top-down decision about what topics people should discuss is a way to remove agency from individual meetups. Our meetups in Berlin also aren’t discussions about topics but rather about doing rationality exercises together.
Hi Christian, sorry I wasn’t entirely clear in expressing this idea. As I mentioned in the appendix, there are several communities that are doing just fine on their own, producing things, having regular events, having structure such as an NGO, etc. I think Berlin, Prague, Moscow, and NYC clearly fall into this category, and possibly other cities like Warsaw, Amsterdam, Tel Aviv, Helsinki, Toronto, Seattle, Sydney, and Oxford. (Apologies if I missed any obvious examples, but you get the idea).
However, these are a small minority of the total meetup groups that exist, which number over 100. It’s the rest of those groups that I’m really targeting—ones in smaller cities or just cities with fewer active rationalists, where there’s little sense of direction and it’s often hard to even sustain a regular meetup at all. I organized meetups in a city like that myself a few years back, and I’ve talked to plenty of people from other cities who would really appreciate more guidance and/or centralized organization. I think some of these meetups would also appreciate being granted a sense of legitimacy by becoming an “official” LessWrong meetup, even if the designation doesn’t ultimately have much meaning on its own.
I also wasn’t proposing forcing any kind of structure on anyone. Groups can continue to function however they want (running marathons as a group seems great!) and should feel totally free to ignore the top-down planning if they don’t need it. The topic-of-the-month idea was intended to a) help people in smaller, far-flung communities feel like part of a larger conversation, and b) provide a default structure for groups that have trouble with structure. (In the survey I ran a few months ago, lots of people expressed dissatisfaction that the only thing they ever did at meetups was unstructured socializing, which they didn’t feel provided a ton of value). Doing rationality exercises together is really great, but is also something many communities can’t do because they e.g. don’t have any CFAR alumni, or because there isn’t enough buy-in to the group that people want to commit to rationality training.
I hope that clears things up. Sorry if you felt attacked or something.
I’m not sure how “official meetups” would be any different by nature of being “official” or even what official means. The idea also seems a bit strange to me because I don’t think the LessWrong.com team has any claim of being an official arbiter on the term LessWrong.
LessWrong Germany e.V. is a NGO with a 5-figure yearly budget.
It seems to me that an individual toastmasters club has a lot less license to innovate then our local meetup has. A toastmasters club can’t say: “Let’s run this marathon together under the logo of our club.” but our local meetup would have no problem with running a marathon together as an LessWrong team.
It seems to me like making a top-down decision about what topics people should discuss is a way to remove agency from individual meetups. Our meetups in Berlin also aren’t discussions about topics but rather about doing rationality exercises together.
Hi Christian, sorry I wasn’t entirely clear in expressing this idea. As I mentioned in the appendix, there are several communities that are doing just fine on their own, producing things, having regular events, having structure such as an NGO, etc. I think Berlin, Prague, Moscow, and NYC clearly fall into this category, and possibly other cities like Warsaw, Amsterdam, Tel Aviv, Helsinki, Toronto, Seattle, Sydney, and Oxford. (Apologies if I missed any obvious examples, but you get the idea).
However, these are a small minority of the total meetup groups that exist, which number over 100. It’s the rest of those groups that I’m really targeting—ones in smaller cities or just cities with fewer active rationalists, where there’s little sense of direction and it’s often hard to even sustain a regular meetup at all. I organized meetups in a city like that myself a few years back, and I’ve talked to plenty of people from other cities who would really appreciate more guidance and/or centralized organization. I think some of these meetups would also appreciate being granted a sense of legitimacy by becoming an “official” LessWrong meetup, even if the designation doesn’t ultimately have much meaning on its own.
I also wasn’t proposing forcing any kind of structure on anyone. Groups can continue to function however they want (running marathons as a group seems great!) and should feel totally free to ignore the top-down planning if they don’t need it. The topic-of-the-month idea was intended to a) help people in smaller, far-flung communities feel like part of a larger conversation, and b) provide a default structure for groups that have trouble with structure. (In the survey I ran a few months ago, lots of people expressed dissatisfaction that the only thing they ever did at meetups was unstructured socializing, which they didn’t feel provided a ton of value). Doing rationality exercises together is really great, but is also something many communities can’t do because they e.g. don’t have any CFAR alumni, or because there isn’t enough buy-in to the group that people want to commit to rationality training.
I hope that clears things up. Sorry if you felt attacked or something.