Update from Vancouver

post by Evan_Gaensbauer · 2018-02-03T00:35:19.172Z · LW · GW · 0 comments

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I've wanted to do a more detailed update from Vancouver, as the Post-Mortem on the Craft and the Community on here from a few months ago seems to have inspired Vancouver to get organized more than is true of other rationality communities, and is kickstarting an unprecedented reinvogiration of passion for local rationality community organization. The time it'd take me to do that has been better spent actually doing the organizing for Vancouver meetups. Below is quick update from Vancouver. I wrote it as a Facebook post for an audience of community members in Vancouver as part of a strategic review of local rationality organization in the last 6 weeks. The context is there were 6 Vancouver rationality meetups of a wide diversity of topics in January, which is a high a frequency of ratioanality meetups as there has ever been for Vancouver. The rationale for doing so I hope to post later; I thought I'd update the rest of you on what we've been doing.

I can frame what I'm trying to get us in Vancouver to do better having learned how meetup organization in Seattle works. In Seattle, there's complete integration of the rationality and effective altruism community organization. Each week they have a rationality reading group, which are more structured, and an effective altruism meetup, which is more variable week-to-week. However, what's made their meetups successful is the consistency. What they have in Seattle is regular meetups, of the same kind repeating, occurring on a weekly cycle. However, I think doing the same wouldn't work as well in Vancouver, as being eclectic as we are expect most of us desire more dynamism than is typical for rationalists.

So what I'm trying to do is getting meetup organization in Vancouver to work on a monthly cycle.

In January, we organized 6 meetups in total, 4 of which are a kind of meetup I want to see repeated in January:
- Constructive Contrarian Challenge Club (C4)
- spirituality
- global coordination and AI reading/discussion group
- rationality/discussion group (e.g., LW, SSC, etc.)

Other meetups for February which could be integrated into a system of meetups on a monthly cycle:
- biosecurity reading group
- Consciousness Appreciation Club
- bureaucracy day
- authentic relating
- Dungeons & Discourse
- rationalist game nights

These meetups are mostly still of the type "sitting around and talking about intellectual things" thus far. Having more social and party-like events is something I'd like to try once or twice in February. Anyway, how these would be a cyclical system is that each of the meetups listed above would happen once per month, and in total the goal would be ~2 meetups per week. So we'd be having meetups as frequently as are in Seattle, but with a greater diversity of meetups. Realistically I don't know we'll be organized enough in February to hit that benchmark, but I was surprised by how much we got done in January too. So we'll see.

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