I have organized ~100 meetups in Freiburg, Germany over the last 3.5 years and I think this is great advice that matches a lot of my experience. In particular the number one piece of advice I give to new organizers is: You are the most important person at the meetup, make it easy and comfortable for yourself.
Thing I learned from this post and which I will try some more is to boss people around, do readings outside the rationality canon and specifically saying “hey name, can you please try to reduce the amount of conversational space you are taking up?”. Thank you for writing this!
Do not accommodate people who don’t do the readings
If there’s one thing I hate, it’s seeing rationalist groups devolve into vibes based take machines. Rationality meetups should cultivate the more difficult skills required to think correct things about the world, including reading longform pieces of text critically when that is a helpful thing to do (which it often is).
A good solution I have found for this is to assign a reading but have a different reading (ideally a sub-section of the first one) that is short enough so it can be read in about 20 minutes. At the beginning of the meetup I ask who didn’t do the reading (e.g. because they are new, did not have time) and then those people go sit in a corner and spend the first 20 minutes doing the reading instead of joining the discussion. The advantages are:
It incentivized doing the reading upfront because who wants to be reading alone in a room full of cool people you could be talking to instead?
Everyone still knows at least part of what they are talking about during the later discussion
I estimate that this leads to 85% of people doing the reading upfront with the remaining 15% mostly being newcomers (we average ~18 attendees, ~2 of which are new).
I also encounter this quite often and find it a bit irritating. What I found to work quite well is to clearly distinguish between descriptive and normative statements. I will for example ask the other person “Are you making a normative or descriptive statement?” After some forth and back they usually agree they were making a descriptive statement. Then I say “I was making a normative statement, do you disagree with it?”. Often they don’t disagree.
I suspect the confusion occurs because the other person parses the initial claim as a descriptive statement that fails to capture the complexity of the problem.