On The Rationalist Megameetup

post by Screwtape · 2024-11-23T09:08:26.897Z · LW · GW · 3 comments

Contents

  Introduction
  A brief history of the Rationalist Megameetup
  Purposes
  Constrained Optimization
  The Inevitable Comparisons
  The Future
None
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Introduction

First, a bit of blatant advertising: The East Coast Rationalist Megameetup is the evening of December 13th through the morning of December 16th, in Brooklyn, New York City. It's a weekend long unconference timed to coincide with NYC Secular Solstice. Despite the name, people come from all over North America, some for their first rationalist meetup and some who've been going for years. If that sounds fun, you can find out more and buy tickets at rationalistmegameetup.com

Second, a brief note on nomenclature and terminology.

This has in the past been called the East Coast Rationalist Megameetup, The East Coast Solstice Megameetup, the NYC Megameetup, and sometimes just The Megameetup. Calling it The Rationalist Megameetup seemed presumptuous, but other titles are varying amounts of inaccurate as well. Attendees have come from New York City, Massachusetts, Utah, California, and sometimes as far away as Germany. 

I'm going to call it The Rationalist Megameetup in this essay, and I'm inclined to get more relaxed about call it The Rationalist Megameetup as a shorthand in the future. The LessWrong Community Weekend is held in Germany, Vibecamp is held in Maryland, and the Rationality Organizer's Conference was held in California. Effective Altruism is the only adjacent group that consistently is on top of naming their big conferences by city, probably because they’re the ones who run half a dozen or more of them every year.

When I say Rationalist Megameetup in this article, I'm talking about this particular tradition. The LessWrong Community Weekend is obviously a big gathering of people in the Rationalist community. The Rationalist Megameetup is obviously a Saturday and Sunday spent in the company of people who read LessWrong.

A brief history of the Rationalist Megameetup

The first Rationalist style Secular Solstice was held in New York in 2011. 

As far as I can tell, the East Coast Rationalist Megameetup actually predates [LW · GW] the first solstice [LW · GW] by several months, originally a simple call for groups in nearby cities to carpool together, travel to NYC, sleep on the local NYC LessWronger’s couches, and spend a weekend all getting together and sharing skills. This went well enough that they ran it again the next year. 

The first big Secular Solstice - held in a theatre, not a living room, with professional musicians instead of a couple friends on guitar - was held in New York in 2013. People traveled from far away to see Solstice. For many people the secular solstice was their first contact with an in-person Rationalist community. Solstice is good at bringing people together and letting them feel like they’ve found their tribe, so they wanted to keep interacting for longer than a theatre will let you hang around after the show. 

In 2014 the Rationalist Megameetup was scheduled the same weekend as Solstice, primarily taking place in Highgarden (a group house in New York City.) That group house was not available in 2016, so people met in a mall for 2016. That wasn't nearly as satisfying, so the year after (2017) Taymon [LW · GW] rented a weekend apartment for the megameetup. This format worked better, and as Taymon passed the torch to Metaperture [LW · GW] in 2018 and then to me in 2019. In 2020 holding the Rationalist Megameetup was considered a bad idea for global pandemic reasons, but in 2022 I ran it again with the apartment format. 

One of the most common complaints in the post-event survey was that it was too crowded, and people would be willing to pay more for more space. In 2023, I ran the Rationalist Megameetup in a hotel with conference space and hotel rooms.

The point of this recounting is that The Rationalist Meetup wasn’t planned from the beginning to handle the scale it’s grown to. Instead, it’s grown step by step, each time trying to solve a specific problem. Despite this, the purposes have remained remarkably unchanged.

Purposes

It's a lot of people's first meetup. Many people wouldn't drive three hours to go to a regular meetup of nine or ten strangers for a couple hours, but would drive to meet a hundred people for a weekend. Some of them will later drive three hours to visit nine or ten friends they made at the big weekend, staying on a friend's couch for the night. Some of those will later go on to run meetups themselves, even the Rationalist Megameetup. (Hello again!)

It’s also a great place for travelers from other cities to mix. Montreal, Boston, Washington DC, and New York City are obvious examples where they’re just far enough away not to visit each other casually. If you have groups mixing however, then you get to share cool ideas. Every year I get to chat with someone I haven’t talked to recently, and hear the weird new holiday Baltimore’s tried out or how Montreal’s group house situation is doing.

Also, I’m a big fan of rationality meetups teaching or practicing rationality. The megameetup’s structure doesn’t require this and we usually have less of it than I’d like, but it makes a good vehicle for reminding people of ideas or techniques. Last year an attendee ran a bunch of people through some Guild of the Rose workshops. There’s usually a lightning talk on Bayes. I try to lay out Cards Against Rationality or Cambist Booking on some tables for people to play. If ten years from now the rationalist megameetup was full of newcomers and old timers having a good time, meeting each other and making friends, all of whom left the weekend having learned zero new things about decisionmaking or reasoning, I would feel like I was failing.

As an interesting example of how knowledge and purpose gets passed down, here’s the vision for the second East Coast Rationalist Megameetup as written by the person who ran the first and second.

Vision:

• Primarily a social event, with some skill transfer
• Meet people within the LW community, make friends, get contacts
• Get people together for our mutual benefit
• Informal focused discussion/teaching, people in the community know a lot about stuff that's useful to know
• Help lone rationalists be part of the community

-East Coast Megameetup II: Electric Boogalloo [LW · GW]

That’s not bad, especially considering that prior to writing this essay and doing a little digging I hadn’t even realized there were any Rationalist Megameetups that predated Highgarden in 2014.

My purposes don’t need to be your purposes. If you want to attend because it’s a personal tradition, or because it’s the place where you can find the best Optimal Weave players, or you want a place to network for jobs, that’s okay with me. It’s just not the thing I’m optimizing for.

Constrained Optimization

The Rationalist Megameetup has a number of constraints on it, some of which are not obvious.

The Rationalist Megameetup takes place within easy commuting distance of wherever the New York City Solstice is held, on the weekend the Solstice is held. Remember, people travel from hundreds of miles away to attend the NYC Solstice. While they're in town together and have already paid the transportation costs to get there, they'd like to meet each other and hang out together. The one year we were in Jersey – accessible by bus, but not subway – the afterparty got split in two as some people didn’t want to deal with the bus. If the Rationalist Megameetup were held in a different time and place, all the incentives and reasons for its original creation would give rise to a new meetup in NYC that weekend. Constraint: It needs to be the weekend of NYC Solstice, accessible to NYC by subway.

People from out of town will want a place to sleep, and while they can find their own individual hotels it’s natural to want that hotel to be as convenient for where everyone’s hanging out as possible. The most convenient possible sleeping space is one that’s in the same building as the megameetup. You can, if you want, have sleeping space in a different place from the hangout space, but then everyone is going to be going back and forth at irregular times and sometimes they'll invite people to hang out in their room and so you get the sleeping spaces as hangout spaces anyway. Every year I have run the megameetup, around three in the morning “saturday night” someone has unexpectedly-to-themselves realized they need a place to stay the night and asked to crash. Constraint: It needs to have a place to sleep.

When Solstice finishes, people will want to spend time with each other and will naturally descend upon whatever space is most convenient. The Rationalist Megameetup is the obvious congregation point for the solstice afterparty. That means it needs to be ready to handle potentially all of Solstice descending on it, interested in recovering from Solstice and having a good time. You can try saying people who aren’t going to the megameetup can’t come to the afterparty, but checking for gatecrashers isn’t easy for a big event and you don’t want to create an asshole filter. If nothing else, you probably want the people who came to Solstice to be invited. Constraint: It needs to have capacity for potentially all of Solstice to descend upon it Saturday night and stay up very late.

The Rationalist Megameetup needs to be affordable for, without loss of generality, broke college students. Hello! I had my first in-person meeting with The Rationalist Community at one of these, and at the time was a broke recently ex-college student. The first time I went to solstice, I stayed in a hostel that wasn’t near Solstice or the meetup, ate canned fruit and granola bars, and made no friends. The second time I went to solstice, the megameetup had overnight space and it was actually cheaper than the hostel, so I stayed there and made lots of friends. Large events like Solstices and ACX Everywheres are often people's first in-person event, and without an influx of new people any community slowly dies of attrition. Constraint: It needs options that cost similar to a hostel.

This is the point, by the way, where we can't win. Venues you can sleep overnight at in New York City that can handle three digit numbers of people exist, but they are not cheap. Similar binds exist for other criteria. Overnight, large, NYC, or cheap, pick three. 

Right now I think Cheap is the most likely casualty, followed by Overnight. There’s ways to do some price discrimination that alleviate a lot of my concerns that newcomers and students won’t attend. That means we’d want to offer people more for their money, but from looking at conventions I think this is doable.

(I didn’t forget about Solstice, but the Rationalist Megameetup can plan with Solstice to make the dates line up.)

The Inevitable Comparisons

I said above that I sometimes call it the East Coast Rationalist Megameetup and sometimes just the Rationalist Megameetup. Why the "East Coast" part?

Partially tradition. I inherited the Rationalist Megameetup from a past organizer after I'd been attending for a couple of years, and it'd always been called the East Coast Rationalist Megameetup as far as I knew. Fine, but that doesn't answer why it got called that back in the day.

As far as I can tell, there wasn't another Rationalist Megameetup going on in 2010 or 2011. The East Coast Rationalist Megameetup seems to have started a wave of meetups though: over the next few years there's Seattle/Vancouver [LW · GW] in 2013, then Upper Canada [LW · GW] in 2014, a European LessWrong Community Weekend [LW · GW] in 2014, an Australian Megameetup [LW · GW] in 2014. Boston [LW · GW] even got in on the action, though by any definition it's in the range of an East Coast Megameetup. This is wild conjecture, but the title "East Coast" seems to have both helped define the scope (who should come) and deliberately invite other regions to run their megameetups. More of these would be cool, and the basic format is pretty transportable, but after that burst in the mid 2010's they seem to have dried up.

While there are still thriving rationalist communities in all those places, only the East Coast Rationalist Megameetup (ECRM) in NYC and the European LessWrong Community Weekend seem to have taken root as annual tentpole events, growing larger until they require venues larger than a short term apartment rental. I got to go to the European LessWrong Community Weekend (LWCW) in 2023. LWCW felt very familar at its core; a place to sleep, food to eat together, and fascinating people to talk to who were running cool workshops. I took a lot of notes on how to improve the East Coast Rationalist Megameetup, and overall I felt pretty good about the upgrades I made. 

Vibecamp has only run three times so far (with a number of smaller mid-year events) but feels like it's already older. Swapping a conference space for a rambling large camp with a lot of outdoor space, Vibecamp is less centrally a rationalist event but it's certainly adjacent. It's only been running for three years, but it feels like it's established enough that it's going to keep going year after year.

And then there's LessOnline. LessOnline is what happens when you don't just let aspiring rationalists organize things part time and run a lot of sessions. LessOnline is what happens when a team of full time aspiring rationalists get to own and extensively rebuild the venue primarily for events, then custom build a website for that one event, and then by some combination of being located in Berkeley California plus the event team also happening to run LessWrong they don't so much get a keynote speaker as get a keynote tsunami.

(Lest it sound like I'm disparaging other megameetups by comparison, I think a lot of this comes down to price. The all-in ticket, including sleeping space, for attending both the LWCW and the ECRM in 2023 would still be less than just the event ticket for LessOnline. I'm pretty sure LessOnline was the full-time job for at least two people for months. That kind of time and money buys a really good meetup even if you're building it from scratch!)

This list is not exhaustive. Especially once you branch out into the adjacent events, there isn't a neatly organized list of everything like this with clean lines of what does or doesn't count.

Which megameetup should you go to? Whichever is closest is my suggestion. Every megameetup style rationalist event I've been to has been really enjoyable. Ask your local meetup organizer if they know of any in the area, or keep an eye out for announcements of things. The biggest ones are conveniently staggered throughout the year if you feel like you want more than one in your life, but transit costs can easily wind up higher than the ticket or overnight room cost.

The Future

The Rationalist Megameetup can grow.

Every year I have run the Rationalist Megameetup (the one in New York City, I'm back to dropping the "East Coast" part) so far, we’ve run out of space and I’ve had people ask if they can come anyway.

We could limit the size by taking applications and turning people away. This adds a bit of extra organizer overhead reading and sorting applications, though would make certain parts of planning much easier like not having to look for a new venue every year. We could splinter the Rationalist Megameetup in to megameetups plural, with a bunch of spaces along the lines of the 2017-2019, which wouldn’t be terrible but I think would have less free mixing and mingling.

I think there’s a path for the Rationalist Megameetup to steadily grow bigger and more coordinated every year. I view one plausible end state of the megameetup as something akin to DEF CON or Dragoncon, with five digit numbers of people descending on a city for several days of enjoying a common interest. There would be a lot of steady, sustained growth to get there as well as organizational changes to make it work, but on the attendee side nothing qualitatively different now that we’ve made the jump to a conference venue.

With longevity comes the small traditions of a hundred people's stories. One fantasy and science fiction convention I know of has adult attendees whose parents brought them to the con as infants. There's in-jokes and old friendships that started at the Rationalist Megameetup and continue to this day.

I want to grow the Rationalist Megameetup. I already miss the coziness of 2017, when I stayed up late into the night in a blanket fort and pitched people on playing more D&D as a way to connect with people. But the parts of this system I care the most about get better for having more people I think. More skills available to exchange. More newcomers who get to meet the community they’ve read about online, and maybe it’s a fun memory or maybe they decide it’s worth moving across states or continents to spend more time with these people. More mixing of people from various local communities who can take the connections and ideas back with them.

And we haven’t lost all the cozy. 

Last year, in a room in New York, a couple of aspiring rationalists made a blanket fort and sang together in the darkness. I was one of them, and like every year when I get to go to the Rationalist Megameetup it was one of the best moments of my year in a weekend that’s full of best moments.

I can’t promise it will be that marvelous for you, but I think it might be. If that sounds like something you want to join, take a look at rationalistmegameetup.com.

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