This topic got extensive coverage in the latter half of Making Sense (Sam Harris) open-access podcast titled ‘Engineering the Apocalypse’.
My main takeaways were:
It’s (too) early (as this post also highlights regarding safety)
The technology is being tested in LEDs (cheaper) but is quite far away from commercial use
It could be a dud, but the ROI would be amazing (millions for billions)
Starting at 3:11
Thank you for providing the advice! I’ve been to one of the meetups and found it enjoyable and smooth-sailing.
My tip, from organizing EA meetups for a local group (Rotterdam, The Netherlands) is to always have a set topic and if possible also presentation prepared. In the before-time, every second meetup was a general intro to EA and social meetup. But doing this online, with different social interactions, many of the new participants didn’t speak up/the conversation died down way earlier than usual.
Are you tracking where attendees come from? (% email, % type of Facebook group, or a sequence of steps?)
Do you know why the attendees come to a talk? (mostly for a speaker/topic, social interaction with like-minded people, other reasons?)
Is there something specific that you do for people who join for the first time, or give instructions on how to get the most out of the meetup?
No. Have actually been working in/on science communication about psychedelics (as medicines) and have received both positive feedback from researchers and am collaborating with a few.
One thing that I like about being parallel to academia is that you can build things outside of the constraints. For instance am building a tracker of all RCTs which will update automatically when new papers are added. And made a map of research that visually shows where what is taking place.