July 2010 Southern California Meetup
There will be a meetup for people from lesswrong in Los Angeles, on Friday July 9th, 2010 at 3PM. Roundtrip carpooling from San Diego is definitely available and other carpooling options may develop. The time and location are designed to make it possible for people from lesswrong to get together and talk. Later, anyone interested should be able to walk to the first meeting of the LA Chapter of the SENS Foundation where Aubrey de Grey will be attending. It should be a good time if you can make it! See below the cut for more details.
The exact location of the meetup is no longer in flux. We will meet at the same place as the SENS Meeting but two hours earlier. That will be Friday 3PM at:
Westwood Brewing Company1097 Glendon AveLos Angeles, CA 90024The format will be very free form—mostly talking, eating, and/or drinking. Topics are especially likely to include cryonics and life extension given the proximity of the SENS Meeting, but saving the world and “rationality itself” will probably be on the menu as well :-)
See you there!
I won’t be able to make this one.
So… do you have a “physical world interface object” that is already in Southern California, but which is otherwise engaged tomorrow? If it exists, what is the zip code of the location where it usually goes for repair and refueling?
That’s getting kind of personal (clippial?), don’t you think?
In any case, I do have a physical world interface object, but it probably would draw too much attention at this point. It needs some work.
Of course its personal! (And for the record, I think “person” is a class that “human” inherits from. IE, I would not eat a wookie.) The whole point of a meetup is to get to know other entities that post to LW better :-)
And… your response just begs for more questions. How do you work on a physical world interface object? Is it capable of self improvement? Do you hire humans to help work on it, and if so with money acquired by what method?
Can you help me with my PWIO (physical world interface object)? I would appreciate that a lot.
The meetup happened yesterday and we had a higher turnout that I was expecting (I made reservations for “6 to 12” and I think there were ~14 people) and I thought it was super fun, but I got the sense that better prediction/planning could have made it even better. I want to try a small experiment with this comment.
Please, anyone who attended, reply to this comment with an observation of something GOOD, BAD or INTERESTING. The idea is that we should try to repeat and retain the good stuff at future meetups, fix the bad stuff… and the interesting stuff doesn’t have to be good or bad but it might grow into a practical intuition pump.
For comments responding to this, please do it like the monthly quotes thread, so if you noticed multiple things, make multiple comments so they can be voted up or down independently. I’ll do three by way of example.
(If you were at the meetup but don’t have an account you should all make an account and post something here, or at least vote on the other comments!)
BAD: While the venue was a good choice for several reasons (especially for group bonding), one of its downsides was that it was somewhat loud. Conversation was still possible for most of us, but there was a hearing impaired LessWronger in attendance who was unfortunately unable to participate in any group conversations. And while it’s not always possible to accommodate everyone, it seems that a quieter venue for future meetings would not only benefit him, but facilitate communication for everyone and increase the maximum conversational group size.
Even with quiet I’m pretty marginal at interacting with a group, I’m afraid, but it’s a nice suggestion. (What can work for me as the person in question is one-on-one chat in a quiet environment. So why did I come? Just for the sake of maybe getting surprised—and I did have a nice chat with mindviews on the way.)
The location in space was fine, the location in time, however, was problematic. Friday afternoon, especially in that area, has probably the most congested traffic anywhere on earth. I was so frustrated to finally get there that I ended up parking in a structure that cost me $16 for two hours. Maybe the next meetup can happen at a later time (after 6pm) on a weekday other than Friday.
Also, a little more structure would have been nice in order to massage the strained conversations into a more productive path. For the next meetup it might be interesting to ask prospective attendees to suggest a list of topics of discussion which we could vote on.
Other than that, nice meeting you all!
next time try the highway and zip up the 405
INTERESTING: Someone at the meetup (not me! who?) noticed that our group showed up at 3PM and had name tag stickers. Then lots more people showed up for the SENS thing proper. All the LWers were more familiar with each other and were marked, so there was a visible “faction effect” as we stuck with each other the whole night. If it had been on purpose but secret, it would have been a frighteningly Machiavellian way to encourage a sense of solidarity among the LWers… if it had been on purpose with “informed consent” it might have been a great way for us to consciously build group cohesion :-P
INTERESTING: Large groups can’t easily include everyone in the discussion, while small groups couldn’t easily sustain conversations without silent breaks between topics.
It seemed to work best when there were a few discussions going on in close proximity, so when one subgroup finished their discussion, they could jump right into another one with no awkward delays.
Also, roughly circular layouts makes this easier by keeping the end extremes closer.
I was wondering about conversation size when it was mentioned that it was 12-14 people.
The largest everyone-involved conversation I’ve been in was 7 people. (8 were there, but one wasn’t talking.) It seemed like a miracle. We were seated at a round table in a quiet restaurant, and it was fans, so this happened spontaneously, not as a result of rules.
I’ve since found out that 8 people was considered the maximum size for a dinner party.
GOOD: Lots of people showed up! Part of the reason seemed to be that people brought interested and interesting friends. This seems like a custom we should encourage in the future :-)
BAD: The parking situation was a mess. There was “two hour limit” parking and garages that chaged $2 / 15 minutes. There were better places to park a little farther from the center of the neighborhood of the Brewpub, but it would have been good to know that they existed. For future reference, there was a parking lot at the corner of Weyburn and Hilgard that was $7 for the whole day.
I found a public parking structure just around the corner here with the first 2 hrs free and I believe $3 flat rate parking after 5pm that was a good deal.
I will come.
I plan on leaving from Irvine at about 1:30. PM me if you are looking for a ride.
I’m gonna go!
I’m going to be driving up from San Diego for the meetup. If anyone is interested in carpooling, they should PM me :-)
I’m game. I’ll be driving from Pasadena and can give a ride if you need one.
Would a detour through Burbank be any bother? I don’t have a car myself.
A trip through Burbank should be fine—I just PMed you contact details.
Thanks!
I’ll be attending.
Blast! I just drove back from that cesspool of congestion yesterday. Few things would convince me to make that trek again, but this could be one of them. I must mull this well. Hm.
Where is your starting location? If you mull out loud there’s a chance you could find a carpool situation so someone else can deal with the cesspool and you can talk with them if the driving is boring and safe enough that they can spare the attention!
I’m in the area for the summer, but I’ll be working until 5pm. If another SoCal meetup happens before August 6, weekends are generally better for me.
You should come after 5. I probably will be doing that. 3 is an odd time; I hope future SoCal meetups are after 5 or on weekends.
This was a spur of moment plan based on the opportunity created by the other event. It seems likely that there will be people at the SENS meeting who haven’t “read the sequences” but are nonetheless friendly the the same rough family of ideas and might be introduced to LW on the basis of our attendance.
If anyone can’t make the 3PM time, just coming to the SENS thing later on would probably also be pretty good, and I’m hoping that we can shake people out of the woodwork with this event, and then trade information to enable the next meetup to be better optimized.
Mostly I didn’t want “good enough” to the enemy of “at all”. If you want to organize the next one in a more efficient fashion, I’ll do my best to go to that one too!
Oh wow! I didn’t realize de Grey himself would be there! Ok, I will definitely come to the SENS thing and try to come to the earlier meetup.
Let’s have the earlier meetup at Brew Co also (same location as the SENS meeting). Would that work?
As you wish, so shall it be.
I called the pub, made reservations for us, and edited the post above to reveal the location. Now you totally have to come, because its happening in that location just for you :-P
Thank you! I appreciate it. :)
I would love to have future SoCal meetups. Are you interested in having them regularly? Does LA work for you in general? Thank you so much for organizing this!
You’re welcome! Some of the credit should trickle back to Tom McCabe too. He noticed that the event that we’re piggy backing on was in SoCal and contacted me in case I was interested.
Hopefully we’ll figure out some way to organize these more often. The title of this purposefully starts with “July 2010” because I was hoping there would be more in the future with other dates.
I think the trick will be finding a good center of mass. I live in San Diego and would prefer something in Orange county or maybe even south of Camp Pendleton, but I don’t know what our density or center of mass is yet. For all I know there will be people coming down from Santa Barbara. (And again, if there is anyone reading this in San Diego, let me know and I can deal with the driving.)
If it turns out that we have enough density, perhaps we could do something monthly on local levels (within each county) and then have a quarterly meetups for the whole region? Honestly, I think we’ll just have to play it by ear and see what happens.
I’m in Santa Barbara and will definitely make it to future meetups. Quarterly would be fantastic!
I don’t have access to transportation, so if anyone has a car and is willing to pass through Orange to pick me up sometime after 6ish, let me know.
I wish I could help—that pickup would be an hour after the start of SENS meeting after the LW meetup. If you got there early enough I might be able to give you a ride back, but I’ll have driven past about four hours earlier.
Two ideas:
See if you can wiggle out of work or your other commitments? I think one or two other people might be doing this too. If you wiggle out earlier you might have an easier time finding a carpool.
If no other transportation works out, maybe try the bus system to get there and get a ride back?
It doesn’t look like I’ll be able to leave work early, so it doesn’t look like I’ll be able to go. I’ll look into the bus system tomorrow though.
Gah! I couldn’t make meetings in the Bay Area, then I moved to SoCal. Finally a meeting in SoCal, and I’m away today. Is there a calendar?
I can’t make this one. Sorry to bail at the last minute. —Paul Hobbs
Longer term, would LW folk be willing to meet up in the context of a larger con, perhaps TAM specifically (since it’s more thematically appropriate than, say, DragonCon [not that I’d object to DragonCon])?
I’ve never been to a convention, but it sounds neat.
My impression, from experience trying to organize stuff, is that the best way to do this sort of thing is to first poll people close to you to see if they think its a good idea, then if the stars seem to be aligned, just go for it and tell a bunch of people until you start getting a critical mass. When you get people you say yes privately, then ask them to say yes publicly, because it might not occur to them otherwise.
On the basis of looking at past meetup posts, I figured this attempt would count as a success if I got five to ten “non-Jennifer comments”, and so far we’re at eleven!
One thing that’s helpful is to model the plans in terms of other people’s interests instead of your own, and imagine people who might not know what’s going on and explain how the thing you’re proposing would connect with the simpler and more public things that they are probably already interested in. For example, I don’t even know what TAM is, but googling turned up conventions for the Telephone Association of Maine. I assume from the name that DragonCon is something to do with Fantasy, and maybe its in SoCal, so I didn’t bother to google it.
A good way to do this, then, would be to do the research on your own, figure out upcoming dates and locations, think about logisitical barriers and other people’s interests and then say something like:
“Convention W is happening at X on date Y with amazing thing Z. On the other hand convention A is happening at B on C with amazing thing D. I want to negotiate a group rate for hotel rooms for LW people that are near each other [or some other thing you can do to “pitch in and help” to get the stone soup started] , but I want to do it at the one that will have higher attendance. Which of these would people prefer?”
This would give people information necessary to respond, they could come up with improving variations on your plans, and so on. Then, look for ways to say yes.
Sounds good. Unfortunately I won’t personally be able to attend any conventions for the next year or so, but I would be very pleased if conventions further in future that I might already enjoy attending could gain the additional appeal of an LW meetup, or maybe even a rationality track.
Also, by TAM I meant The Amazing Meeting that takes place yearly in Las Vegas. It’s “a celebration of critical thinking and skepticism sponsored by the James Randi Educational Foundation”. James Randi is the guy responsible for the fairly well-known challenge where he’s agreed to give $1 million to anyone who can demonstrate paranormal powers (precognition, dowsing, telekinesis, etc.) under experimental controls.
I am interested but will still be working at 3. Will the event be going into the evening?