HPMOR Wrap Parties: Resources, Information and Discussion
Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality—Wrap Party Summary Thread
As many of you probably read on the HPMOR author’s note last month, I am the coordinator of the HPMOR Wrap parties. Many of you have reached out to me, I put hundreds of you into contact with each other, and over 20 parties on 4 continents are now going to happen. Now it is time to get as much attendance to the events as possible, make sure that we all get the most out of the events and use the momentum that HPMOR has brought this community. This post will serve as a central location for all information and resources available for the parties, as well as a place for discussion in the comments.
Information
I set up a few different systems to coordinate everyone, and make it easier for everyone interested in the wrap parties to connect. Here they are:
The Map:
This map can help you get a quick overview of how many people in your area are strongly interested, and who might help you with organizing an event. Remember that not even half of the people currently RSVP’d for Facebook events have added themselves to the map, so this map is the absolute minimum level of engagement in your area. I will be adding all events to the map as they are posted in the Facebook group. Please add yourself to the map if you can! (But please be careful to not destroy the pins of anyone else, to use the correct pin type, and to not create any empty pins.)
The Facebook Group:
This is the main location for discussion of the wrap parties and also the location at which all of the events are conveniently collected. You can find all events under the “Events” tab, and if you add your own event in this group you can conveniently invite everyone who has added themselves to this group. I would still additionally advice you to invite all of your friends who might be interested, since they might not have joined the group.
The Organizer Mailing List:
This mailing list is the fastest way for me to reach all of the organizers at the same time, and also the fastest way for all organizers to be kept up to speed with the newest resources available. Use this mailing list to discuss ideas and get help from other organizers.
Parties [Updated: March 9th, 10:00PM]
To help you quickly get a sense of whether there is a party happening in your area, here is a list of all the parties that I have so far learned about, with links to their respective Facebook events. Currently everything is on Facebook because that is much easier to coordinate, but I will try to add contact information for organizers for all of these parties very soon, so that people without Facebook can easily find the information that they need:
Parties in Asia:
Parties in Australia:
Parties in Europe:
Germany, Cologne [marcel_mueller@mail.de]
Parties in North America:
MIT, Massachusetts [14th of March]
Cambridge, Massachusetts [15th of March]
Party Count: 54
Country Count: 19
Continent Count: 4
Please comment on this thread, send me a message, or add an event to the Facebook page (and invite me) to add your own party to this list!
Resources
Handbook:
To help everyone get their party started, Brayden McLean compiled a wonderful handbook for party organizers:
Free Books:
We are providing free copies of the first 17 chapters of HPMOR to all parties in the U.S.! Just fill out this form today or tomorrow, and we will try to send you as many copies as you think you will need to hook all of your friends.
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1mM-jgiy9teaINEED0WvXCCEZD12FP1m7Qn6vnYLZ4kM/viewform
The Party Spreadsheet:
I compiled a spreadsheet with all of the parties that I’ve gotten to know of so far. This will hopefully help people without Facebook get into contact with the organizers of the closest party, and generally make information easier available. Commenting is enabled, so if you are one of the organizers and want any of the information changed, please leave a comment on the spreadsheet and I will change it as quickly as possible.
Call for Stories:
I want to read a few HPMOR stories at the Berkeley event, and also just generally allow people to share how HPMOR has affected their lives. For that, we have the Call for Stories document, which allows people to write their own HPMOR stories and share them with the world.
I will continue keeping this post updated with all valuable material that is sent to me.
- Impact purchase first round results by (EA Forum; 10 Apr 2015 3:43 UTC; 13 points)
- HPMOR Wrap Parties: Resources, Information and Discussion [link to Main post] by (5 Mar 2015 21:15 UTC; 5 points)
- 's comment on Welcome to Less Wrong! (7th thread, December 2014) by (6 Mar 2015 12:04 UTC; 1 point)
- 's comment on Impact purchase round 3 by (EA Forum; 15 Jun 2015 21:02 UTC; 0 points)
Protips:
Given both demographics and recent discourse, you are going to want vegetarian and vegan options for food.
HPMOR has a large hatedom, for various reasons. Key vectors for trolls are photos, videos, and flyers. Be more conscious than usual about personal boundaries and privacy.
Public events are going to bring together people with varying viewpoints; be emotionally prepared for having your bubble popped by culture shock.
Betting pools on the number of clueless attendees who showed up for the Potter and forgot about the Rationality are generally frowned upon by the general public. (That means you, Hanson!)
Don’t be gross, in either appearance or manners.
Don’t hand out pamphlets to the general public; it looks, you know...
I’ll be at more than one of these.
In related news, you should probably update your user page. :(
Incendio.
Eeeeeeeeek.
I’d like to request that when the date and time of a meetup is finalized, that somebody post as much on LW. I don’t have a facebook and would prefer to keep it that way, but I also don’t want to miss the London party. Please and thank you.
Yes, please! Not everyone is on Facebook.
I’ll post details to the LW London google group; and I don’t know whether individually posting every wrap party to LW is a good idea, but if we collectively decide that’s what we’re doing, I’ll do that as well. But you should be able to see the event without a Facebook account, even if you can’t RSVP (and in the specific case of London, you can RSVP—we have a separate google docs survey).
Thanks! I can see the Facebook event, and I have RSVP’d via the survey.
Why not do the whole coordination here on LW instead of Facebook? Much easier to access, since everything on LW is visible without login. And creating an account is easy and has no privacy/terms of use issues.
(Habryka here. My account still appears to be broken)
I want to outline my thinking a bit, about why I decided to organize all of this with so much reliance on Facebook:
The attendance at these events heavily relies on networking effects and reducing trivial inconveniences. I did consider organizing it on LessWrong, but it’s just less integrated into most peoples life as Facebook is. This was the easiest way for people to invite their friends, get notified of new parties, spread information and, most importantly, get interested in the event if you so far haven’t been completely hooked on the book.
This is the last obvious big opportunity to get more people to read the book. Sending people to LessWrong, a website they’ve never been to and often only tangentially heard off, to then send an email to the current organizer, not really knowing who else of their friends will be there, if any, and then add that event manually in their own calendar, just seemed like a path that too many people would not bother to go.
I don’t like Facebook. I don’t like their stance on privacy, and I don’t like the social pressure that drives everyone to sign up for it. But I think the stakes on this are high, and the potential positive impact on the world is large. And I think the number of people who are shied away from this because of its reliance on Facebook is smaller than the number of people who would not otherwise come.
This is the reason why I made all information available outside of Facebook and spent multiple hours copying details from the Facebook events into the spreadsheet. Because I want to make sure that if someone doesn’t have Facebook, and wants to attend, that they will be able to. But the need to reduce trivial inconveniences for that category is a lot lower, as I think most would be willing to jump through a lot of hoops to be able to attend these.
I don’t think the decision was completely clear, but I did make the decision consciously and tried my best at weighing the benefits and drawbacks. I am interested in anyone’s thoughts on this.
I loathe Facebook, and I think your decision, your reasoning and your kindness in explaining your reasoning are all correct and admirable. Well done.
If you’re the guy organizing the London party, you did a great job making it easy for me to find the time and venue despite my unbooked face. Thank you for all the effective effort you’ve put in!
Thinking about it from this direction you are probably correct in doing ths via facebook.
Do you think we’ll trust any of your explanations, after you told a bunch of innocent, impressionable schoolchildren a completely made up story about how Voldemort was a good guy?
(Writing from this account, since through some strange bug my original account can’t comment on this post):
I just added the Spreadsheet to the list of resources, and am just in the process of getting everyone’s contact information. I hope this helps everyone who doesn’t have Facebook to find the details for the parties in their area. I think posting every wrap party individually is probably a bad idea.
The marginalization of non-FB people is rather… visible X-D
Want to see the original artwork of that Patronus/DaVinci/Ascent-of-Man mashup that everyone links to? Come to the wrap party in Brooklyn, NY!
https://www.facebook.com/events/1795707230654401/
Canberra HPMOR Wrap Party:
https://www.facebook.com/events/1799129743644509/
http://lesswrong.com/meetups/1ay
Huge kudos to you for putting this together, Habryka!
Atlanta, GA HPMoR Wrap Party
https://www.facebook.com/events/1560468017538610/
http://lesswrong.com/lw/lts/meetup_atlanta_hpmor_wrap_party/
Austin, TX HPMoR Wrap Party—Facebook, LW.
Herzliya, Israel party.
That was the tentative location, but it looks like the party’s location is the Google offices at 98 Yigal Alon Street in Tel Aviv. (See FB group.)
Novosibirsk, Russia: http://vk.com/topic-41783644_31273609 We will start at 1 p.m. UTC 03/15/2015 (20:00 local time). Терешкова, 30
“Herzelia, Israel” should now be “Tel Aviv, Israel” as the location changed, The link to the FB event stays the same. Thanks!
Durham, NC party -- 1:00 PM EDT at Fullsteam, 726 Rigsbee Avenue, 27701.
FB: https://www.facebook.com/events/721959147924349/
Hi, I’m thinking of hosting a 3-army battle at the Madison wrap-up. Do you have suggestions for how it would work? I’m thinking armbands or headbands that you try to snatch off, like in the mangas. It doesn’t seem very battle-like though.
P.S. small correction about the Madison wrap-up. Middleton and Madison are basically the same city, and the state is Wisconsin.
In NY, we haven’t decided exactly what rules are best, but we’re going to aim for short battle-rounds (15 minutes or so) and try out new rules each round, starting with the simplest ones.
For material components, we’re getting a bunch of glowsticks, which can then be used as wands, rolled up into rings that you can toss at people while shouting “somnium” or whatever (knocking them out if they get hit), or attach lots of them together to make a circle of protection. (We’ll play around with different configurations to see what’s fun)
Paintball or airsoft guns?
Los Angeles Wrap Party
Meeting Place: Griffith Observatory front lawn
Address: 2800 E Observatory Rd, Los Angeles, CA 90027
Date/Time: March 14, 2015: 6:00pm
Cost: Free access to the complex, planetarium shows are $7
Facebook event page: https://www.facebook.com/events/1585754024996915/
Contact email: ladyastralis at gmail youknowtherest
Confirmed attendees: About 14 (as of 3⁄8)
Please bring: A (picnic) blanket, some snacks/food, some way to read HPMOR that has its own light source (I called the observatory—they turn off the lights pretty early), and a thermos of hot cocoa. Don’t forget a coat!
Notes: The final planetarium show is at 8:45pm. A fitting tribute. The complex closes at 10:00pm. I will be wearing my Ravenclaw scarf.
Looking forward to finally meeting other HPMOR fans!
Amanda
Dublin, Ireland party details added to the map.
Pittsburgh HPMoR Wrap Party—https://www.facebook.com/events/824097430998639/
We’re meeting up at 3pm on Sunday in Glasgow. It’s not exactly planned as an hpmor wrap party (the organiser didn’t even know hpmor was being updated again), but I expect well end up discussing hpmor, and any readers would be welcome.
I just created one in Poland, would you mind adding it to the list :)? Hope it’s not too late… https://www.facebook.com/events/799916140056389/
Fort Collins, Colorado Wrap party—https://www.facebook.com/events/798707153542827/ [please add it to the list]
And I finally managed to get rid of my paper copies of the first 17 chapters of HPMoR. It only took a year and a half to find people who actually wanted them, and then remember to bring them on the right night!
I’ve created a card game to play at the Dublin event, see https://docs.google.com/document/d/120r_YeAdg8rLAT2TUrrikk5jtTXZNE7HhjhTc9SnyJQ/edit#
Just an update—Both “Bangalore,India” parties have decided to unite under one roof. 9pm at Infinitea in Indiranagar.
Oh and congrats on the eulogy Oliver. :)
Philadelphia, 4 PM Saturday, 1508 Sansom St. www.suxinghouse.com/
Just wanted to update that the two parties in Bangalore have been merged. Either of those links will point to the same location and time details, but just in case you’re still editing the list.
hey—any chance I can get books for distribution at our Australia-wide meetup (in July, no rush)? I’m happy to pay for postage of the books to me.
Anyone interested in a Central/Southern California wrap-party? Even if it’s pretty informal?
Just wanted to say that I almost missed this because I only check Main every other month or so. There are a lot of people who only really browse Discussion, and that’s where pretty much all of the HPMOR discussion goes on anyway on LW. Can you x-post? I’m going to make a discussion post linking this Main post just for visibility. If you x-post it, I can delete it, just let me know.
Thanks for organizing this!
Cross-posting here.
Los Angeles party:
https://www.facebook.com/events/1585754024996915/