[Draft] How to Run a Successful Less Wrong Meetup

[Kaj_Sotala]

How to Run a Successful Less Wrong Meetup is a guide that I’ve been working on, based on lukeprog’s instructions, for the last week and a half. As it says in the beginning:

This document is written for anyone who wants to organize a Less Wrong meetup. We expect that this document will help you regardless of whether you want to start a new group or improve an existing one. We have tried to write each section so that it applies in either case.

Here’s the table of contents:

• Why organize a meetup?

• How to build your team of heroes

  • The organizer

  • The welcomer

  • The learning coach

  • The content provider

  • The visionary

  • The networker

• How to announce and organize your meetups

  • Choosing a venue

  • Making the announcement

  • The first meetup

• Long-term meetup group maintenance

  • Retain members by being a social group

  • Conflicts within the group

    • Learn to recognize status conflicts

  • Group norms and epistemic hygiene

• Meetup content

  • Discussions and Presentations

    • Presentations

    • Topical Discussions

    • Meta Discussion

  • Games and Exercises

    • Aumann’s Thunderdome

    • Biased Co-operation

    • Behavioral Analysis

    • Bluffing Games

    • Bust-a-Distortion

    • Calibration Game

    • Cause and Belief

    • Five-Minute Debiasing

    • Hypothetical Apostasies

    • Paranoid Debating

    • Precommit to Updates

    • Rationalization Game

    • Rejection Therapy

    • Repetition Game

    • Status Exercises

    • Zendo

  • General Bacchanalia

  • Example activities at real meetup groups

• Projects

This is a draft version, so feedback would be most welcome, particularly on things like:

• Is this useful?

• Is there something that should be covered isn’t covered at all yet?

• Do you have new games & exercises to suggest?

• Do you have any other content to suggest to any other section?

• Do you disagree with some of the advice given?

• Do you disagree on way something has been worded?

• Etc.

The link above will take you to a Google Docs copy of the document, with the ability to add comments to the draft. Feel free to comment on the guide either as traditional LW comments or by attaching comments to the document itself: both are fine.

EDIT: Here’s the most recent version, though without the commenting ability.

EDIT2: The most recent version as of April 11th, with commenting enabled.

EDIT3: First non-draft version; see also this thread.

[Giles]

It would be useful to have advice on how to build momentum if group membership (especially the “core” group) is very small.

[Kaj_Sotala]

This is an excellent suggestion.

Now, does anyone have any ideas for what advice I could give about that? :-)

[Nisan]

To increase membership, one can:

• Advertise on meetup.com

• Put up fliers on a university campus

• Invite your extramural friends

If your group has a decent number of members but too few core members, this means that most of your membership isn’t getting value out of the community:

• Your meetup content might not be varied enough (see section on meetup content)

[[deleted]]

Bringing friends along to the meetup may be a good idea. They don’t have to be actively LessWrongian, we have had multiple examples of interesting conversations started by newbies brought along by more active members of the group.

If at a university, advertising to student socities: science, philosophy, maths etc.

I have also been thinking of trying to boost the discussion on the meetup group’s mailing list, which may push people to choose to attend the meetup and follow up a discussion. Sequence (re-)runs seem to be a good idea to try.

[[deleted]]

Also, maybe writing up experiences from the meetups and posting those both on the mailing list, and on the LW discussion board could be useful—people can see some examples of activity and maybe those who previously didn’t think it was worth their time will move attending the meetup up on their priorities list.

[Kaj_Sotala]

Based on the suggestions offered here so far, version 4 of the document (not yet public) contains the following:

How to attract new members

Sooner or later, you may wish to find new members. If you have been posting meetup notices on Less Wrong, any regular readers with an interest in showing up have probably already done so. Still, there may be readers who have seen the meetup notices or who might even be subscribed to your mailing list, but haven’t been motivated enough to attend. You can try to make them more interested by documenting how much fun you’re having: write down what you’ve done at various meetups and how people have found those meetups. If the reports sound fun enough, others will be interested in showing up. If the reports don’t sound fun enough, your first priority is making the actual meetups more interesting.

Eventually, though, you may need to reach out to people who aren’t already Less Wrong readers. Getting outsiders interested requires framing the purpose of the group appropriately. You could call yourself a philosophy or psychology discussion group, a self-improvement group, a group of people interested in efficient altruism, or whatever best fits the actual goals of your group. Be sure to come up with a description that actually matches the function of your group. If you say that your group is about self-improvement when it’s actually about discussing philosophy, people who come looking for self-improvement will leave disappointed, while people who would have been interested in philosophy never visit in the first place.

Once you have a description of the group that seems interesting to outsiders, it’s time to advertise it:

• If you have friends who might be interested in the topics discussed at the meetups, ask them to attend sometime.

• Post the reports of fun meetups where people can see them. If the person writing them has a personal blog, they could be posted there. Others can then share a link to the report on Facebook, Twitter or similar, mentioning that they attended the meetup in question and it was fun.

• Print out fliers advertising your meetup group and put them up in places that have lots of people with intellectual interests. University campuses might be good.

• See if there are any local skeptic, science, philosophy, etc. groups that you could advertise to. If at a university, try suitable student societies.

• Create a group on meetup.com (costs $12/​​month).

If the content of your meetups is interesting and fun enough, the new people who visit once will choose to come again. The main difference between planning a meetup for Less Wrong regulars and planning it for people who don’t know of the site is that non-readers will have less knowledge of the Less Wrong jargon and concepts. So choose activities that don’t require a deep understanding of such things, and try to avoid the jargon if you can.

Comments?

[falenas108]

To start it, make one big meetup that you think will draw people. Make it at an exciting place in the area, chose an interesting meetup topic, or plan a fun activity. An alternative if you’re really desperate for people is to draw on the surrounding area by posting in more public places.

From there, all that has to happen is a successful Less Wrong meetup, using the strategies in the OP. That is usually enough to get some of the members to come back a few times, and if the meetups continue being interesting, new members will become regulars.

[fiddlemath]

I’ve spent at least an hour a week, for the past, oh several months, trying to put together things for our meetup. I’m tired right now, and don’t have much criticism, but: This is awesome. I’ll make real use of this. Thank you.

We should take most of the activities in this guide and make wiki stubs for them. Meetup members and organizers could fill in details, experiences, variants that they’ve tried, and how well those things worked.

[Kaj_Sotala]

:-)

When you do make use of the guide, please let me know which sections you found the most useful, and whether there was anything that you’d have liked to see added/​changed/​removed in retrospect.

[fiddlemath]

Definitely. I’ll give yet more feedback later; right now, I’ve left a minor edit about my quote as a comment on the doc. (“Barriques” is the name of a coffee shop, but the context to know that has been removed. If you change it to “a coffee shop” or somesuch, I won’t mind.)

[Kaj_Sotala]

Good point, thanks. I’ll change it.

[calcsam]

It’s good to see someone organize the relevant information and make it actionable. Good job lukeprog and Kaj_Sotala!

[Kaj_Sotala]

Thank you!

[[deleted]]

Some comments:

• I would change the order of role descriptions section and the following section on starting a group.

• I think there could be more on actually starting a meetup group.

• The “retaining members by being a social group” subsection is too long and has several paragraphs on maintaining a healthy discussion structure rather than the social aspect. Maybe splitting the subsection could help?

• It is obviously great to aim to have a group which is “doing something” and is not just purely social (although nothing wrong with that either!) but I would caution against too much formality at the early stages of a meetup group. A pleasantly friendly group can be equally efficient, I believe, but it takes time to develop into such a group, and formality may be counterproductive. (By formality I mean things like prescribed roles, forcing a structure onto meetups early on, quenching discussions that “stray away” from an initial topic etc.) Allowing people to bond first and then increasing the “productivity” of the group by some agreed formalising changes may be better.

• I wrote a post on my experience of setting up a meetup group, which may be of interest: http://​​lesswrong.com/​​lw/​​bc2/​​setting_up_lw_meetups_in_unlikely_places_positive/​​

[Kaj_Sotala]

I would change the order of role descriptions section and the following section on starting a group.

This occurred to me as well. I changed it for the (as-yet non-public) version 4 of the document.

The “retaining members by being a social group” subsection is too long and has several paragraphs on maintaining a healthy discussion structure rather than the social aspect. Maybe splitting the subsection could help?

Hmm. Is three pages really too long? I felt that discussion about how to keep the atmosphere pleasant and keeping the discussion structure healthy would be a natural fit for a section that says you should aim to make people friends with each other—since those are sort of requirements for people becoming friends in the first place.

It is obviously great to aim to have a group which is “doing something” and is not just purely social (although nothing wrong with that either!) but I would caution against too much formality at the early stages of a meetup group. A pleasantly friendly group can be equally efficient, I believe, but it takes time to develop into such a group, and formality may be counterproductive. (By formality I mean things like prescribed roles, forcing a structure onto meetups early on, quenching discussions that “stray away” from an initial topic etc.) Allowing people to bond first and then increasing the “productivity” of the group by some agreed formalising changes may be better.

This is an excellent point, thanks. I added the following to the “The first meetup” section (though I’m not sure whether that was the best place for it):

“Excess formality can be counterproductive, especially in the early stages of the meetup group. One may be tempted to actively do things such as prescribing roles, forcing too much structure to the meetups, killing discussions that “stray away” from the initial topics, and so on. The risk is that this may feel off-putting or even silly to people who would have preferred to start off more informally. It may be better to let the participants bond first and then agree upon some formalized changes later on.”

[maia]

The “games & exercises” section is definitely useful. If it grows enough, it might eventually be worthwhile to make that a separate document of specific content to include in meetups.

The most novel part of this, to me, was the “Projects” section. This seems like an obviously good thing for meetups to do, which I hadn’t thought of structuring like that at all.

[[deleted]]

A nit: I and probably many LWers are allergic to phrases like “Psychological research suggests” that aren’t followed by a citation.

[Kaj_Sotala]

Good point. I’ll add links where appropriate.

[wedrifid]

A nit: I and probably many LWers are allergic to phrases like “Psychological research suggests” that aren’t followed by a citation.

It depends on how controversial the research reference is. My tolerance for inappropriate ‘citation needed’ claims is far, far lower than than my tolerance for claims that are made as assertions rather than links. The latter are simply a different form of communication, and one that everyone—speaker and listener alike—should expect to hold less weight than a reference. The former are most often rhetorical gimmicks or one-upmanship.

[[deleted]]

Heh, I never even considered being a metacontrarian about this. You’re probably right. I think I tend to unsympathetically interpret all missing citations. Still, it seems like most on LW would prefer the citation and a good number would notice its absence.

[wedrifid]

Still, it seems like most on LW would prefer the citation and a good number would notice its absence.

It’s true. And I agree that the post in question would be improved with a reference. Link spam is the best thing about most posts!

[Paul Crowley]

It was very easy for me to download the first version as a .doc file and so send it to my Kindle to read later. I can’t work out how to do that with v.4! Can it be made available in the same way? Thanks!

EDIT: you can send HTML direct to your Kindle. Sorry.

[John_Maxwell]

Maybe replace “successful” with “awesome” in the title to emphasize that a meetup that’s already successful can benefit from the book, and may even be the primary audience? (Or some similar title restructuring.)

[[deleted]]

I tend to think we rationalists overuse ‘awesome’. I also think we use it to show other rationalists we’re rationalists, but to outsiders who are older than college-age it probably comes across as silly.

[John_Maxwell]

Okay, “How to Make Your Less Wrong Meetup Terrific”?

[[deleted]]

Eh, no. But I actually didn’t get the feeling that ‘successful’ suffers from the problem you pointed out.