European Community Weekend in Berlin Impressions Thread

Thanks to everyone (and particularly the organizers) for a fantastic weekend!

Strongest sign of this being a good event: usually I feel drained after a social event, and by the end of the official program I was feeling that, but by the time I got home I was suddenly feeling social and energetic again. Did you people slip something into my drink to make me an extrovert?

(Okay, a lot of it was probably due to the book on charisma that I read just before the meetup and which gave me loads of confidence and useful techniques for getting into the right mindset for being social. But you all being so awesome made them much easier to use! So there. <3)

Some comments of what could've been better:

• There were lots of people around, and I'd have loved having a chance to talk with everyone. However, a large part of our waking time was taken up by lecture/workshop-type content, during which there wasn't much of an opportunity for being actively social, Saturday's introduction start notwithstanding. I also felt mentally drained after focusing on such content for the whole day, which made it harder to be actively social afterwards: the Fermi calculation contest felt especially energy-draining, since the time limit was short and stressful enough that I basically just looked at my team's activity from the side.

This isn't to say that the lectures/workshops weren't interesting! The "supercharging your learning" and mnemonics one in particular felt like they might be valuable in the future. But regardless, I think I'd have preferred a stronger focus on social activities. One of the parts about the meetup that I found the most enjoyable was the "Socratic Dialogue" that I ran into on accident, when people engaged in it had taken over my room on Friday. I was a little disappointed that the official program didn't include anything like that.

Suggestions for improvement: favor social activities for the programmed content, at the expense of lecture/workshop-type content. Try to set up such a set of activities that everyone ends up getting introduced and everyone talks with everyone: as it was, there were some people who I simply never got a good chance to talk with. (Maybe the introductory lunch on Friday had more of this kind of thing? Too bad we Finns missed it. :( )

• To the extent that there are lectures, limiting their length would be a good thing. Research apparently suggests that around 25 minutes is the maximum length for people to maintain an optimal focus on lecture-type material. A shorter duration would also force lecturers to focus on the essentials and cut peripheral content.

Suggestions for improvement: enforce a 25-minute limit on how long someone is allowed to lecture before they are required to either end their talk, or somehow engage their audience with e.g. workshop-style activities.

• The meditation exercise would probably have been a better off on Saturday, since meditation while sleep-deprived does not necessarily produce good results, and Sunday morning was probably the time when everyone could be expected to be the most sleep-deprived.

Suggestions for improvement: try to schedule meditation exercises to a time when people are likely to be well-rested. (This may admittedly be an impossible task, but at least try to have them at a time when people are relatively well-rested.)

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One last thing: subjectively at least I felt like I got my social skills to a much better level than on some previous occasions. But I was also mentally drained at times and couldn't always keep it up, plus there were moments when I caught myself doing what felt like mistakes, like looking away from someone too fast or not saying hi when I had the chance, etc. So general feedback of how my social skills came across, by anyone who spoke or otherwise interacted with me, would be appreciated. Here's my anonymous feedback form that you can use for this, though of course it may be difficult to stay truly anonymous: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1Z2he5Tziy7OuVCGbtD2VHrI4U014sm-DRsLFw-A9dH4/viewform .

I, too, have an anonymous feedback form: http://www.admonymous.com/philh . I didn't wear a Crocker's Rules tag on the weekend, but you may assume that I'm wearing one now.

I had a great weekend! I want a plushie now. (When I got home I searched for Cthulhu plushies on Amazon, but they were expensive enough not to be impulse buys, so I don't have one yet.)

It was great to meet everyone, very well done to the organisers. And I liked how most of the speakers included some kind of exercise.

The primary criticism I have is that many of the talks got derailed several times by people asking low-value questions that could have waited until afterwards, and then following up on the speaker's reply. After getting sufficiently annoyed, I arrested two of those discussions on the sunday, but I wish I'd been more proactive about it. (Many of these questions felt uncharitable, like "what you just said seems unlikely to me, and I'd like you to back it up" instead of assuming that the speaker probably knows what they're talking about.) This contributed to almost all of the speakers overrunning.

Suggestions to help with this (though after writing them, I'm realising that "google for advice about this from people who know what they're talking about" would have been a good idea):

• Ask participants not to ask low-value questions; a rule of thumb might be "if you didn't understand something, go ahead and ask; if you'd like to know more, wait until afterwards".
• Assume that participants will ask low-value questions anyway, and tell the speakers to be ruthless in cutting off these discussions. Organizers should also cut them off.
• Assume that these discussions won't get cut out completely anyway, and advise the speakers to plan for, I dunno, 10% of their talk to be lost to them? If the talk is too short, Q&A or socializing afterwards are not bad things.

Along with others, I would have liked more social activities.

I also didn't realize before the weekend that most meals weren't included. It wasn't a big deal, but I would have brought more money with me if I'd known.

Once again, though: it was a great event! Big thank you to the organisers, speakers, and everyone who came.

Thanks for the weekend! Got to put a face on a few names, and talk of interesting things ...

Random notes:

• The nametag thing was a good idea
• The systematic schedule slip was a bit annoying (and predictable), and beginning/end times could have been enforced a bit more strictly.
• I liked the learning workshop, and the one on mnemonics, and the one on Fermi estimates; but there were interesting ideas dispersed in all workshops.
• Something to avoid for the next mnemonic workshop: an exercise where people can be asked to form a vivid mental link between "vomit" and (... though ... I imagine that might sometimes be a useful hack to improve one's diet by eliminating some particular unhealthy things from it ...)
• I was a bit surprised by how hard I found it to understand some people's German accent ...

I would probably have preferred less workshop and more interesting side discussions, though I'm not sure of a good way of ensuring that the side discussions stay of high quality.

Overall the organizers did a great job at finding a usable location in a nice part of town for so many people, finding places to eat for everybody, etc.

I liked the presentations. The pre-presentation package for the Fermi estimates thing was great, and the lightning talks round was a great concept to get some really distilled presentations in.

Random practical notes for the Fermi estimates lecture: If you want people to do an estimate with a hard time limit, don't have the questions pre-printed on the work sheets you pass around, that will lead to people pretty much automatically cheating and reading ahead on the questions. Just pass around empty paper and pens and show the words in slides. When showing the correct answer slide, also show the explicit range of values that are accepted as the right answer to make it trivial for the audience to see if they got a good enough answer.

With the exercises on the mnemonics lecture, it turned out to be pretty obvious that speaking single English words out of context to an audience of non-English speakers and expecting them to get the words right doesn't work all that well. Have the words written on slides instead.

Socializing-wise, I ran out of let's-play-nice-with-other-people mental energy about three hours in as I usually do on meetups, which was sort of unfortunate on a 40-hour meetup.

Giving everybody nametags was good.

Short version: It was awesome!

Long version: see here

Following the trend I want to invite feedback for the talk on meditation at the European Community Weekend. You can do so either anonymously or non anonymously (at your own choice) in this Google form.

It was really great to give a talk in front of such an active and critical audience that clearly saw all the strength and weaknesses of the research presented.

Some photos. The album is available only through this link and I will of course remove any photos that you feel are not showing your faces in good (enough) light.

It's a pity so few people took any photos at all.

As for my thoughts. I was surprised by myself. I have a huge personal space, so I feel invaded pretty much all the time (only my kids have unlimited hugs with me, even tkadlubo doesn't). And here, maybe partly because of the tags system, I almost never felt invaded. I did feel overwhelmed by the sheer number of people around me, but I could cope surprisingly well (by my own standards).

I think next time we could expand the 5-10min speeches part. For me it was the best part of all of the workshops, because all the people who did talk, talked briefly and engagingly about what recently is interesting to them. I also think we should make all the workshops more explicitly voluntary. Everybody attended (which is great), but the few people who chose to omit one or two were left without anybody to talk to. This is one of my insights from comparing this meeting with Polish Mensa Annual Gathering (I told Christian about the others, but if required, I will write them down here, too). PMAG is much larger and has an ample schedule of lectures, workshops and contest, but at all times many people are just hanging around talking to others.

Following the examples of Kaj and Gunnar I also set up an anonymous feedback form: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1VRpI7WLwA-6Ig1XfwOPAdSNHWCaG9q2fF0tbk8WyVBE/viewform

Oliver's presentation about Fermi estimates makes the point that it's useful to separate an Fermi estimate into multiple subpredictions.

Is there a tool out there to make the task easy?

I could imagine a webapp or android app, where you say how you want to split and that then adds up the numbers for you. Is there something like that out there?

Following Kajs lead of using Google forms for structured feedback I also created one and would really appreciate your feedback here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/embeddedform?formkey=dHJfcTcwTERJN2g1dWFhWHZaeDB4UWc6MA