I don’t know why you’re asking these questions, but I’m interested in the answer to the first question. Here is some data: Six of my non-LW friends attended Less Wrong meetups. Five of them had opportunities to attend a second meetup, but only one of them did.
It seems like the selection process for the camps might have filtered out whatever class of people contribute to meetups being painful failures. I can imagine a meetup composed of two or three people each, selected from several meetups for maximum get-along-like-a-house-on-fire-ness, would be on the order of magnitude of awesomeness that the camps are attributed.
First question: how many people enjoy meetups? How many enjoy them a lot? How many meetups are disasters painful to recall?
Second question: how many meetups have effects comparable to the substantive explicit and implicit claims being made for the mini-camp and full camp?
Third question: what makes you highly confident that the two classes differ on the second property, but not the first?
I don’t know why you’re asking these questions, but I’m interested in the answer to the first question. Here is some data: Six of my non-LW friends attended Less Wrong meetups. Five of them had opportunities to attend a second meetup, but only one of them did.
It seems like the selection process for the camps might have filtered out whatever class of people contribute to meetups being painful failures. I can imagine a meetup composed of two or three people each, selected from several meetups for maximum get-along-like-a-house-on-fire-ness, would be on the order of magnitude of awesomeness that the camps are attributed.