Shannon is a network hub. I spent some time at her previous house and made a lot of connections, including my current partners.

Ooh, interesting idea. I'm throwing dinner parties once a week. I'll throw in an invite for these visitors while they're here provided I'm notified of their contact info and dietary needs and the date of the stay in advance.

Darn! If only I were a female androphile, rather than a male one... I eagerly await the day this post reads "large group of female rationalists now requires gay-best-friend figure for company, dialogue about hair and SAVING the WORLD".

This is a really neat idea, yay for propagating relationships that wouldn't otherwise have occurred.

What does it mean "being agenty" ?

FYI, I'm female and visiting for the month of July anyway, staying with Anna etc.

Anything for a female rationalist already planning on moving to Berkeley in August? :)

Shannon is a connector and will help introduce you to other interesting people! I'd advocate that people stay at her place even if they already have other crash space in Berkeley - as this way you are likely to meet new people that you otherwise would not have met.

I recently (June 10-18th) stayed at Shannon's place in Berkeley - additional advantages include it being within walking distance of public transportation! :)

I'd love to meet more rationalist women, but sadly there's no way I could visit the US this summer. If any of you are ever in the UK, it would be great to meet you.

This does sound like a good idea, and it's a very generous invitation. Unfortunately, I am neither a woman, nor will I be traveling to Berkeley anytime soon. I do have one concern though.

The sorts of things that I am likely to find compelling are:

Caring about progress for humanity in the areas of living longer, healthier, and happier

Caring about FAI

Being agenty

Having interests in the sort of geeky things that a lot of the community is interested in (math/sciences/psychology)

The second item on this list strikes me as perhaps not very well thought out. In the last LW survey, 16.5% of respondents identified uFAI as the most likely existential risk, well below two other responses, despite the fact that it is the only one that gets a significant amount of discussion here. In fact, I don't think I've seen any discussion of whether, if uFAI is not the most likely existential risk, that FAI is the risk that rationalists should be focusing primarily on. So part of the point I want to make is that I'm concerned with how much we have equated in our minds the concepts of "rationalist" and "supporter of the Singularity Institute".

The other, more specific point I wanted to make is that it seems to me to be a bad idea to try to recruit members, for a group based around one topic (learning to think better), exclusively from a sample of people who are interested in a different topic (FAI). I would predict that there are a large number of female aspiring rationalists who don't really get the concept of CEV, or are all that interested. If you filter for that, I think you're going to miss out on an awful lot of people that we would like to become part of the community.

I imagine I would need to provide my own transportation, yes?

I'm not applying for this because I'm not quite in the right circumstances for it--but I'm female and moving to the peninsula in mid-August for work, and would be interested in being part of social events. (I've been to 2 or 3 Berkeley meetups in the past when on other trips in fact.)

Haha! Very curious to know how this turns out!

If this opportunity ever comes around again, I want to do this! Female-mathy-transhumanist-educator sums up a lot of me. I organize the still-fledgling Atlanta LessWrong meetups, and I want to bring them back some memes from a highly concentrated rationalist community!