Meetups Notes (Q1 2025)

post by jenn (pixx) · 2025-03-31T01:12:11.774Z · LW · GW · 2 comments

Contents

  The Old Year and the New
  (The Right to) Sex
  Writer Spotlight: Ozy Brennan
  Research Party: Microplastics
  Writer Spotlight: Zvi
  Palmer Luckey, American Vulcan
  Skillshare: Getting Good at Groceries
  HPMOR At 10
  Critically Reading Scott Alexander
  Thoughts for Q2
None
2 comments

I've been running meetups since 2019 in Kitchener-Waterloo. These were rationalist-adjacent from 2019-2021 (examples here [LW · GW]) and then explicitly rationalist from 2022 onwards.

Here's a low-effort/stream of consciousness rundown of some meetups I ran in Q1 2025. Sometime late last year, I resolved to develop my meetup posts in such a way that they're more plug-and-play-able by other organizers who are interested in running meetups on the same topics. Below you'll find links to said meetup posts (which generally have an intro, required and supplemental readings, and discussion questions for sparking conversation—all free to take), and brief notes on how they went and how they can go better. Which is to say, this post might be kind of boring for non-organizers.

The Old Year and the New [? · GW]

The first meetup of the year is customarily a new years' reflection meetup. Originally sourced from @maia [LW · GW]'s meetup cookbook, but various organizers post about their riffs in the organizer discord every year, and I try to incorporate the interesting ones.

Higher attendance than average, lots of new folks and people who have only come to one or two meetups before, perhaps because the required level of context is relatively low and everyone enjoys(?) new years resolutions. As always, if more than 8 people show up, you gotta split them into different discussion groups. We had three of like 5-6 people each.

Meetup was nice in that people went around and shared more about their personal lives than they usually do at these things, and walked away feeling like they got something pretty tangible out of the meetup.

(The Right to) Sex [? · GW]

So I came across an event series in Toronto that was having a meetup on the ethics of sexual desire and I was basically like "sounds neat, would be great if it was not a 3 hour bus ride away". Sadly, bedroom politics turns out to be one of those topics where there is more desire to talk about it than safe social venues for doing so, so 20+ people ended up turning up, most of them without RSVPing (could be coincidence, could be that the culture war subject pulled in more of the periphery members, could be that people didn't want to RSVP to an event that is explicitly about sex).

Attendees were respectful and thoughtful and I didn't find moderation to be difficult. I designated a trusted regular at each conversational circle to be the unofficial moderator, and reminded everyone that in order to be a good conversationalist one should try to match their level of participation to the others in the group (e.g. if you notice that others are speaking less than you, try speaking up less; if you notice that others are speaking more than you, try speaking up more).

Fairly early into the meetup it became obvious that people who came as couples don't feel like they can speak frankly when their partner is in the same conversational circle as them; it's worthwhile to separate them out into different conversational spaces. There was one couple where person A really wanted to hear person B's takes, but person B was very obviously hesitant to speak with person A right next to them. The trick is to convince person A that "staying to hear person B's takes" is a fabricated option [LW · GW], either they leave and person B gives their take, or they stay and person B will not actually say their take at all.

Categorizing discussion questions as mild/medium/spicy and designating different conversational spaces for each was a good idea, it allowed people to establish boundaries on what they wanted to talk about, and avoid what they found boring or distasteful. However, I think there are more spaces in e.g. private friend groups to talk about questions in the mild and medium categories, so a lot of people remained in spicy spaces the whole night. This was maybe fine? But just between you and me.... I respected the people who only stayed in the spicy spaces a bit less P:

Writer Spotlight: Ozy Brennan [? · GW]

A new meetup format I wanted to play with, the second writer featured after Paul Graham [? · GW]. I know Ozy a bit socially and it was fun to work with him to curate a list of readings for the group.

I really like the idea of writer spotlights and want to do more of them, but they still feel kind of undercooked/frankensteiny to me at this point. I want to spotlight a bunch of the writer's works, but that necessarily results in everyone reading a different subset. (I try to not assign over 5k words of mandatory readings for any given meetup unless it can't be helped.) And so then the discussion questions are required to be kind of vague!

I generally generate them from a ... not quite "let's try to understand the umwelt of this author" but somewhat coming from that direction, maybe "here are the discussion questions that I model them as finding particularly interesting", but I'm unsure that's the best way of going about it. For one thing, I read more rat stuff than most of my attendees and the curse of knowledge could be a real thing here.

Despite that, this was an interesting meetup and the discussion questions pushed us to engage more deeply with issues around animal welfare and moral uncertainty, which I think Ozy would endorse.

Research Party: Microplastics [? · GW]

A little more prep required than usual (I had to design a research agenda) but resulted in a nice little deliverable [LW · GW]! This was really important to me because the last time we did a research party (evaluating local charities for effectiveness [? · GW]), we generated a lot of useful data but failed to package it up properly and now they live in half a dozen incomprehensible google sheets tabs.

Very few people attended this one, but I don't consider it a failure for any given meetup to not appeal to the broadest range of people and I think more research parties are on the horizon for the group.

Writer Spotlight: Zvi [? · GW]

Similar issues as the Ozy meetup, but maybe kind of worse too because a very large fraction of Zvi's work is meant to be fairly ephemeral/speed premium chasing. The guy himself said in 2022 that he should write more evergreen posts, and then, well, started doing a weekly AI roundup instead.

Also, there's the AI guys in our group (and me) who read him a bunch, and the non-AI non-me guys in the group who don't read him that much, so there was more of an inferential gap between halves of the meetup, which is challenging. (This didn't happen for Ozy because ozyposts, like scott posts and LW/EA Forum posts that break certain karma thresholds, are beamed into the server via RSS bot, meaning everyone had at least a passing familiarity with Ozy's deal and what he writes about.)

Another issue is that Zvi's corpus is just way too large, and really did not benefit from being shoved into a single meetup. Hmm, I guess actually every writer I want to spotlight has the same issue? Which means that going forwards for writer spotlights, unless their corpus is unsually small, I should focus on thematic slices of their work, instead of attempting a whole gestalt. It's actually fine and totally not illegal to dedicate more than one meetup out of my ongoing weekly rationality meetups to a writer who is not Scott or EY. 

Zvi helpfully breaks down some of his best-of posts by category here; I think viable slices can be made from most of the sub-headings featured. Might attempt a Pronatalism Per Zvi meetup at some point... 

Palmer Luckey, American Vulcan [? · GW]

I generally don't focus a meetup on a single post, but I thought this one was interesting enough that I might try it, and trying to read it from an EA angle seemed like an interesting additional challenge. The meetup went well and I had a good time, but in retrospect the discussion questions seem kind of tortured and I'm dissatisfied with them. Would definitely have benefitted from a second, more critical reading to provide contrast, but I'm somewhat at a loss for what a good companion piece would be.

Skillshare: Getting Good at Groceries [? · GW]

The Ottawa rationalists have a recurring meetup format that they call the "skillshare", which is when one guy in the group knows how to do a thing and teaches it to everyone else. It's a good format, so of course I stole it. Other organizers should consider asking their attendees if there are specific skills that they have that they think can be reasonably transmitted to other people in like a 3 hour period. Brin very nicely wrote up a very comprehensive guide to grocery shopping for the rest of us for the meetup, but in general I think most skillshares are lower-effort and this is entirely fine.

HPMOR At 10 [? · GW]

An anniversary party for HPMOR is a great excuse for a book swap focused on works of fiction! Same as the new years' meetup, I found it really enjoyable to go around the group and have everyone who attended have a designated speaking time to share their own thoughts with the group. I should think about doing that more in meetups somehow, but the traditional readings → discussion structure doesn't exactly facilitate it well.

Critically Reading Scott Alexander [? · GW]

I found an Elizabeth Sandifer post from 2021 that made me very angry on first reading and very thoughtful on the second, so I decided to subject my group to it. One of the most interesting meetups of the quarter for sure; the group that attended were split exactly 50/50 between people who rejected Sandifer's thesis outright and people who... well, didn't exactly support Sandifer, but took some of her points?

I came out of it with a much more nuanced take on Untitled. It's a piece that I really liked when I first read it, and then upon rereading a decade later seems to progressively fall apart. After the meetup, it now seems to me like a really important cultural artifact from a certain period of internet history, and worth preserving for that reason. 

It was definitely interesting to explain to the younger and less online folks what the actual vibe of internet feminism was like at the time. It's easy to read Untitled now and see Alexander as some sort of raging misogynist, so me and some of the other folks had to both provide some deep Scott lore (prev posts hes done from the same era that establish his Feminism Creds (despite him not being a feminist ikik)) and also like explain the Utter State of mainstream online feminist discourse at the time. Honestly it would be a massive public service for someone to write a blog post putting it into historical context; as it stands it still gets linked every so often as incontrovertible proof that Scott hates women. Not me though

I also finally got the pun in the title.

Ok, actually organizer-y things. How did I know about the 50/50 split? I got people to raise their hands for being pro-Scott and pro-Sandifer at the beginning of the meetup. Half of the folks raised their hands for being pro-Scott, and then when I asked for the pro-Sandifer people were like "well we're not exactly pro-Sandifer but maybe more anti-Scott?". And that got a quarter. And then I asked for centrists and got the final quarter of hands.

If there was a marked tilt in one direction, I would have defaulted to supporting the other side; being an organizer comes with a cache of clout and this can even the scales. But in this case, I thought it would be fun to break people up into 2 discussion groups based on their "teams", and then shuffle the teams for a homogeneous mix halfway into the meetup. This worked out pretty well!

Thoughts for Q2

• At the Sandifer meetup someone was sad that when we split into the groups, the cheese was left for the pro-Scott side. In the future perhaps consider setting up all the snacks at the kitchen counter instead of splitting the selection 50/50 at the two discussion tables. This would also facilitate people getting up and mixing a bit more between groups, which seems like a good thing.
• As the local EA group's dissolution fades more into the past I keep forgetting about their vestigial infrastructure. I should definitely resume posting the EA-aligned meetups (which I try to do one a month of) to their discord.
• Have been thinking recently about classical liberalism and freedom of thought, and the role my meetup can play in a small way. I started prep for a spotlight on right wing substacks in the adjacency and immediately began spiraling about the optics of doing such a thing. Unsure to what degree this reaction is endorsed. (At the very least such a meetup should not be titled something like "alt right rationalists" because sometimes my own past meetups end up on the first page of google results and jumpscare me)
• I owe the group one EA-themed meetup for March. (The Sandifer meetup took the place of a Holden Karnofsky spotlight which I struggled to turn into something coherent and then gave up on)
• I said at the beginning of the year that this is the year we start taking advantage of being in a double-college town and getting guest speakers, but I... still have not reached out to anyone on the shortlist. Consider changing that or dropping it instead of having it remain in limbo
• Decent mix of workshops and readings-based discussions in the first quarter, and good mix of rationalist and non-rationalist readings. For the second quarter, let's try to have at least one mandatory reading from before, say, 1960?

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