Sometime mid-HPMOR, we had a biweekly Saturday midday meetup group to discuss some number of chapters. We started at the beginning and would read (or not read) ?5? or so chapters per meetup until we ran out of new material, after which we met sporadically when there was a new chapter. If memory serves, we met for brunch a couple of times, then shifted to doing food truck food + hanging out a local brewery. After discussion these meetups would generally segue into at least a whole afternoon if not a whole day of hangouts.
At least once or twice, we got some folks who ardently insisted they’d never ever ever ever come to a LW meetup. We also occasionally got attendees from places outside the Triangle for whom it wasn’t feasible to make the trip to our LW discussion meetup.
We talked about moving on to other rationality fic (Luminosity in particular) after HPMOR wrapped but that didn’t happen for some reason (possibly it got cold before we got around to it, and the food truck+brewery combo is somewhat less enchanting in such weather.)
I rarely have a whole Saturday to devote to discussion, beer, ping pong, coffee, and Bullitron anymore, but I remember these with a lot of fondness.
Did you get people that did crossover from these meetups to the others? It seems like a more lightweight / fun topic like this might be good for letting people get involved more easily?
We had some people who were in both, but no one who started out just coming to HPMOR and then joined discussion, to the best of my recollection. It’s possible we could have done a better job of (a) actively cross-promoting (b) tying discussion topics in to HPMOR stuff.
HPMOR meetup
Sometime mid-HPMOR, we had a biweekly Saturday midday meetup group to discuss some number of chapters. We started at the beginning and would read (or not read) ?5? or so chapters per meetup until we ran out of new material, after which we met sporadically when there was a new chapter. If memory serves, we met for brunch a couple of times, then shifted to doing food truck food + hanging out a local brewery. After discussion these meetups would generally segue into at least a whole afternoon if not a whole day of hangouts.
At least once or twice, we got some folks who ardently insisted they’d never ever ever ever come to a LW meetup. We also occasionally got attendees from places outside the Triangle for whom it wasn’t feasible to make the trip to our LW discussion meetup.
We talked about moving on to other rationality fic (Luminosity in particular) after HPMOR wrapped but that didn’t happen for some reason (possibly it got cold before we got around to it, and the food truck+brewery combo is somewhat less enchanting in such weather.)
I rarely have a whole Saturday to devote to discussion, beer, ping pong, coffee, and Bullitron anymore, but I remember these with a lot of fondness.
Did you get people that did crossover from these meetups to the others? It seems like a more lightweight / fun topic like this might be good for letting people get involved more easily?
We had some people who were in both, but no one who started out just coming to HPMOR and then joined discussion, to the best of my recollection. It’s possible we could have done a better job of (a) actively cross-promoting (b) tying discussion topics in to HPMOR stuff.