I am sufficiently excited and qualified to declare this comment section open for participation. The time is right now, the place is right here. Please make a best effort to comment in English. The topic is physical meetups all over the world; for arbitrary topics, please consider the Open Thread room two doors down the hall, room 393.
This may be a topic for a different post, but at the meetup I've been going to, we've recently been having discussions about attracting more women to come to our group, given that its an overwhelmingly male-dominated group. Basically it's boiled down to:
1. What could we do to get more women to come (and hopefully stay)?
2. Do we care enough about the goal of getting more women to come to do those things?
Point (2) is very dependent on point (1), since the more intrusive the things we decide we need to do to accomplish this goal are, the less likely we are to want to do them. We've definitely settled on the fact that all else equal, we'd like to have more women show up.
I'm sure that we are far from being the only group to have this "issue", so for groups that previously had this issue and were able to overcome it, what did you end up doing?
ACX readership in general is heavily male so your best bet is probably just to advertise the meetups more in hopes that more people show up. That way, you increase the odds that at least a few of them will be women.
My current best answer to 1 is to find one woman whose interested in running a meetup, and second woman willing to say she'll show up to that. Encourage them to pick the topics. My guess is this won't be intrusive, and the regular organizer would even appreciate having someone else run things once in a while.
The groups I know of with the most women have a woman as the primary organizer. One of them has sometimes asked how to get more men to come and hopefully stay, which is an uncommon problem to say the least. I sometimes call this "founder effects are magic" because I can't figure out what exactly she's doing differently- if I was just looking at the announcement text and topics, I wouldn't have guessed there was a gender difference going on.
Network effects would be my first guess, i.e. that new people going to the meetups are very disproportionally already friends with at least one person there, and most people have more same- than cross-sex friendships. My experience has also been that this is even more true for women than men, especially if the women (correctly) suspect the meetup to be male-dominated.
I do not think a meetup where the gender ratio reflects the gender ratio of the readership is a bad thing, per se. (My guess would be that the fraction of women might be slightly higher because they are generally more social, but it could also be the other way round because women are more likely to have competing social activities.) I would be generally opposed to affirmative action measures.
However, I can totally see the possibility of a self-propagating pattern where ten guys and one woman show up, and three of the men try to inaptly flirt with the woman in a way which makes her uncomfortable, causing her not to join subsequent meetups, which would be a bad outcome.
If that is a concern, then instituting a rule to the tune of "you are allowed to ask a stranger woman if she would like to drink a coffee with you once during the meetup but should otherwise try to strive not to show romantic interest in them, unless she is wearing an Aella-party-style armband which indicates other preferences" on a per-meetup basis might be a good idea.
> I do not think a meetup where the gender ratio reflects the gender ratio of the readership is a bad thing, per se.
Don't disagree, but an argument for specifically trying to skew more equal is that people (of whatever the minority gender is) who come would be more comfortable/enjoy it more, and/or more people of that gender would be interested in showing up (increasing the overall number of people you can get), which both seem like general good things.
I understand your point, but I hypothesize that the uncomfortableness would mostly be around the total number of female attendants, not so much the ratio.
If I was the only woman in a group of ten men, I might have some "I feel like I stepped into the wrong locker room" vibes, I suppose. (As a guy, I can not say I have been in that exact situation.)
The ratio might also play a role (being one of three women in ten people total is very different from being one out of three in 100 people total), but to a lesser extend.
I would also recommend banning asking women if they are more uncomfortable with one or the other during the meetup, though. :)
Could be part of an online questionnaire after the meetup, though.
Yeah, I agree that achieving a perfect ratio seems unnecessary for this and it's probably more about passing some threshold.
I've been in some situations with mostly women (I'm a guy), but I hesitate to extrapolate much from them, since I feel like to the extent that I was uncomfortable it was mostly due to some stuff that feels fairly specific to me.
> If that is a concern, then instituting a rule to the tune of "you are allowed to ask a stranger woman if she would like to drink a coffee with you once during the meetup but should otherwise try to strive not to show romantic interest in them, unless she is wearing an Aella-party-style armband which indicates other preferences" on a per-meetup basis might be a good idea.
If I knew your group had such a rule, I would be concerned that “asking the woman if she wants a coffee” was what happened every time a woman joined, and that there probably wouldn’t be other women there. While clear armband signalling is a good idea, few women are going to have chosen to do this, especially if they are new to a group.
I’d say that generally there should be a norm that if women make up less than a third of the group, men should not show romantic interest in any of the women or try to arrange to meet them individually unless a woman specifically and clearly indicates that she wants this (by using her words, “Would you like to meet up some time?”, or wearing some sort of special device). This is because the proportions change the sense of threat and potential hostility around these interactions.
If you want women to feel able to regularly attend your group and chat in a relaxed manner, getting to know you, then you don’t want them experiencing your group as a threatening situation.
I agree it's not a bad thing per se. I've been the only woman at my local meetup sometimes, and I've not found it a problem, and AFAIK the men haven't found it a problem. I'm fairly used to being the only girl in a STEM class or the only woman on an engineering team.
It's not very PC of me, but if I walked into a SSC/ACX/etc meetup and it was majority female, I'd be worried I'd got the wrong place!
It's a good point. Is he trying to be inclusive/woke, or trying to find a lady rationalist as a life partner? Or some third thing I haven't thought of? (I would argue the second, while obviously not nonexistent since I am talking to one, is rare enough to not be a reasonable goal for most male rationalists.)
I find it slightly amusing that a good number of the comments are fellas speculating on how to not frighten off women with romantic advances, when a non-zero number of women may actually heartily welcome them.
Ya know, I heard endlessly how much women hate being asked out by every man around in nerd spaces and how horrible it is. I suspect they're only welcome from certain guys, or the sheer number gets annoying. The ratio in these places is always heavily lopsided.
It seems to vary heavily by woman as well. Some get it all the time, some never. There’s probably a correlation with attractiveness, but I don’t think that’s the only factor.
This doesn’t help with any individual woman, of course, since you don’t know how much she gets asked out unless you just saw three other people do it, but it may explain some of the conflicting data.
Those kind of comments make me think that the asker category of "women" probably doesn't include me/people like me (decidedly middle aged, didn't even THINK of "being advanced at" as a potential issue in this kind of context as it never happens to me in social situations that are not explicitly "hookup coded" 🤣).
An interesting question is, given the obsession with the male loneliness epidemic, whether a couple of them ought to be left that way, since in-person men's spaces are so few these days, and the sort of nerdy guys who go to these may have difficulty finding other friends.
You could have mixed meetups, men's meetups, and even women's meetups if you can find enough women rationalists! Maybe in the Bay Area?
“7.5” people showed up to the Grass Valley, CA meeting in 2024, and I must admit I’m curious. Did this include one person who Zoomed in? Or a pregnancy?
One person was just so great they are counted as 1.5 people. I believe the census does something like this as well when they find an unusually large person.
Sad to see that the Santiago meetup had 0 takers. I wanted to go but had a previous engagement. I don't want whoever organized to get discouraged, so I hereby commit to make an honest effort to come and to help organize if necessary.
At the moment there are no organizers in Santiago (or indeed in South America at all), so I'd encourage you to sign up. If you say you're minimally excited/confident and someone else shows up who is more excited/confident they'll give them the slot, so don't worry about taking the job away from someone more "deserving" or whatever.
Oh no, don't stop if you're having fun, you seem to be doing alright at it! I think more people should emulate me in encouraging people to run ACX meetups. This is one of several traits I wish to inculcate in the world.
There is an effort to coordinate the (mostly tiny) European ACX meetups through an unofficial ACX Whatsapp community. It also includes a channel for the (mostly inexistent) Spanish-speaking ACX readers. Feel free to join and try to find some other South Americans there. And feel free to join and create a channel for Portuguese-speaking ACX readers.
You can fill out the form with 1 (out of 5) experience and 1 (out of 5) enthusiasm if you want. I don't know this is the case for Santiago, but I have seen cases where multiple people offered to help organize if someone else took the lead and . . . nobody took the lead, so it didn't happen.
Any demand for a meetup in Albuquerque? If so let me know and I can arrange a meetup and probably get a couple people from the local EA group to come.
However I'm the only person I know in abq who is more interested in an acx meetup than just doing another EA meetup. Thus I can't justify doing it unless there's some demand.
The best way I know of to figure out if there's demand for a meetup in a city is to have someone run an ACX Everywhere there and see. I'm obviously inclined to get more meetups on the margin (you don't get a role like ACX Meetups Czar by being the normal amount of interested in ACX meetups) but I think it's fine to try once a year and see what the demand is like.
We've got a handful of regulars and had a rare few meetups with up to like a dozen people, but more frequently we've had meetups with 2 or three people. Median is probably 4 if none of the regulars is busy. Last time we had a meetup was June 3rd.
I don't know if there are many ACX readers in the Inland Empire (California), but if there were a meetup in that area I'd probably come occasionally. The LA and Orange County meetups are rather far away for me...
Would you be willing to run a meetup there and see how many people show up? Sometimes people try running an ACX Everywhere in a new area and nobody shows up, but that just means sitting at a cafe or park for an hour or so with a book. Sometimes people get surprised- my favourite example here is Cavendish, a town of about a thousand people that had ten people show up to the ACX Everywhere.
I do not think I would be a very good meetup organizer (I am generally bad at carrying on conversations with strangers, and I'm a student with a pretty busy schedule on weekends and evenings when meetups would be happening). I'll think about it, though, and maybe sign up.
I know there are Indian readers here, though unsure how many from Mumbai. Nevertheless, have applied to organize an event in Mumbai on 27th Sep. Let's see!
ACX is organizing a series of meetups around the world. Organizers are needed by August 23rd to host events between https://www.paybyplatema.cx September 1st and October 31st.
Wow i am very excited for taking a part in this discussion this really fantastic and appreciating post so keep doing your work is best for more details you can visit: https://onstreamhd.app/onstream-for-ios/
I know of with the most women have a woman as the primary organizer. One of them has sometimes asked how to get more men to come and hopefully stay, which is an uncommon https://www-dailypay.com problem to say the least. I sometimes call this "founder effects are magic" because I can't figure out what exactly she's doing differently- if I was just looking at the announcement text and topics
The thoroughness of your analysis is truly impressive. It took me a little while to read all of the comments, but I found the article to be quite intriguing. https://pips-game.com
Sounds like the perfect push to stop lurking and just host one. The form looks easy, and even a low‑key coffee shop meetup is better than waiting for someone else. Count me in. https://sora-2-ai.com/
I am sufficiently excited and qualified to declare this comment section open for participation. The time is right now, the place is right here. Please make a best effort to comment in English. The topic is physical meetups all over the world; for arbitrary topics, please consider the Open Thread room two doors down the hall, room 393.
This may be a topic for a different post, but at the meetup I've been going to, we've recently been having discussions about attracting more women to come to our group, given that its an overwhelmingly male-dominated group. Basically it's boiled down to:
1. What could we do to get more women to come (and hopefully stay)?
2. Do we care enough about the goal of getting more women to come to do those things?
Point (2) is very dependent on point (1), since the more intrusive the things we decide we need to do to accomplish this goal are, the less likely we are to want to do them. We've definitely settled on the fact that all else equal, we'd like to have more women show up.
I'm sure that we are far from being the only group to have this "issue", so for groups that previously had this issue and were able to overcome it, what did you end up doing?
ACX readership in general is heavily male so your best bet is probably just to advertise the meetups more in hopes that more people show up. That way, you increase the odds that at least a few of them will be women.
My current best answer to 1 is to find one woman whose interested in running a meetup, and second woman willing to say she'll show up to that. Encourage them to pick the topics. My guess is this won't be intrusive, and the regular organizer would even appreciate having someone else run things once in a while.
The groups I know of with the most women have a woman as the primary organizer. One of them has sometimes asked how to get more men to come and hopefully stay, which is an uncommon problem to say the least. I sometimes call this "founder effects are magic" because I can't figure out what exactly she's doing differently- if I was just looking at the announcement text and topics, I wouldn't have guessed there was a gender difference going on.
Network effects would be my first guess, i.e. that new people going to the meetups are very disproportionally already friends with at least one person there, and most people have more same- than cross-sex friendships. My experience has also been that this is even more true for women than men, especially if the women (correctly) suspect the meetup to be male-dominated.
I do not think a meetup where the gender ratio reflects the gender ratio of the readership is a bad thing, per se. (My guess would be that the fraction of women might be slightly higher because they are generally more social, but it could also be the other way round because women are more likely to have competing social activities.) I would be generally opposed to affirmative action measures.
However, I can totally see the possibility of a self-propagating pattern where ten guys and one woman show up, and three of the men try to inaptly flirt with the woman in a way which makes her uncomfortable, causing her not to join subsequent meetups, which would be a bad outcome.
If that is a concern, then instituting a rule to the tune of "you are allowed to ask a stranger woman if she would like to drink a coffee with you once during the meetup but should otherwise try to strive not to show romantic interest in them, unless she is wearing an Aella-party-style armband which indicates other preferences" on a per-meetup basis might be a good idea.
> I do not think a meetup where the gender ratio reflects the gender ratio of the readership is a bad thing, per se.
Don't disagree, but an argument for specifically trying to skew more equal is that people (of whatever the minority gender is) who come would be more comfortable/enjoy it more, and/or more people of that gender would be interested in showing up (increasing the overall number of people you can get), which both seem like general good things.
I understand your point, but I hypothesize that the uncomfortableness would mostly be around the total number of female attendants, not so much the ratio.
If I was the only woman in a group of ten men, I might have some "I feel like I stepped into the wrong locker room" vibes, I suppose. (As a guy, I can not say I have been in that exact situation.)
The ratio might also play a role (being one of three women in ten people total is very different from being one out of three in 100 people total), but to a lesser extend.
I would also recommend banning asking women if they are more uncomfortable with one or the other during the meetup, though. :)
Could be part of an online questionnaire after the meetup, though.
Yeah, I agree that achieving a perfect ratio seems unnecessary for this and it's probably more about passing some threshold.
I've been in some situations with mostly women (I'm a guy), but I hesitate to extrapolate much from them, since I feel like to the extent that I was uncomfortable it was mostly due to some stuff that feels fairly specific to me.
> If that is a concern, then instituting a rule to the tune of "you are allowed to ask a stranger woman if she would like to drink a coffee with you once during the meetup but should otherwise try to strive not to show romantic interest in them, unless she is wearing an Aella-party-style armband which indicates other preferences" on a per-meetup basis might be a good idea.
If I knew your group had such a rule, I would be concerned that “asking the woman if she wants a coffee” was what happened every time a woman joined, and that there probably wouldn’t be other women there. While clear armband signalling is a good idea, few women are going to have chosen to do this, especially if they are new to a group.
I’d say that generally there should be a norm that if women make up less than a third of the group, men should not show romantic interest in any of the women or try to arrange to meet them individually unless a woman specifically and clearly indicates that she wants this (by using her words, “Would you like to meet up some time?”, or wearing some sort of special device). This is because the proportions change the sense of threat and potential hostility around these interactions.
If you want women to feel able to regularly attend your group and chat in a relaxed manner, getting to know you, then you don’t want them experiencing your group as a threatening situation.
I agree it's not a bad thing per se. I've been the only woman at my local meetup sometimes, and I've not found it a problem, and AFAIK the men haven't found it a problem. I'm fairly used to being the only girl in a STEM class or the only woman on an engineering team.
It's not very PC of me, but if I walked into a SSC/ACX/etc meetup and it was majority female, I'd be worried I'd got the wrong place!
Question 0.5 should probably be *why* do you want more women to attend your group?
The answers change slightly depending on the motivation.
It's a good point. Is he trying to be inclusive/woke, or trying to find a lady rationalist as a life partner? Or some third thing I haven't thought of? (I would argue the second, while obviously not nonexistent since I am talking to one, is rare enough to not be a reasonable goal for most male rationalists.)
I find it slightly amusing that a good number of the comments are fellas speculating on how to not frighten off women with romantic advances, when a non-zero number of women may actually heartily welcome them.
Ya know, I heard endlessly how much women hate being asked out by every man around in nerd spaces and how horrible it is. I suspect they're only welcome from certain guys, or the sheer number gets annoying. The ratio in these places is always heavily lopsided.
It seems to vary heavily by woman as well. Some get it all the time, some never. There’s probably a correlation with attractiveness, but I don’t think that’s the only factor.
This doesn’t help with any individual woman, of course, since you don’t know how much she gets asked out unless you just saw three other people do it, but it may explain some of the conflicting data.
Those kind of comments make me think that the asker category of "women" probably doesn't include me/people like me (decidedly middle aged, didn't even THINK of "being advanced at" as a potential issue in this kind of context as it never happens to me in social situations that are not explicitly "hookup coded" 🤣).
An interesting question is, given the obsession with the male loneliness epidemic, whether a couple of them ought to be left that way, since in-person men's spaces are so few these days, and the sort of nerdy guys who go to these may have difficulty finding other friends.
You could have mixed meetups, men's meetups, and even women's meetups if you can find enough women rationalists! Maybe in the Bay Area?
“7.5” people showed up to the Grass Valley, CA meeting in 2024, and I must admit I’m curious. Did this include one person who Zoomed in? Or a pregnancy?
Or perhaps a double leg amputee.
They may have simply been skeptical that they possessed the agency of a full person.
Or someone felt smart enough to fill up 1.5 slots.
There was probably like... four actual people at that meeting.
5 people, and 3 billion shrimps.
LOL!
I love that people aren't letting go of the shrimps.
Or perhaps just two legs.
One person was just so great they are counted as 1.5 people. I believe the census does something like this as well when they find an unusually large person.
Sad to see that the Santiago meetup had 0 takers. I wanted to go but had a previous engagement. I don't want whoever organized to get discouraged, so I hereby commit to make an honest effort to come and to help organize if necessary.
At the moment there are no organizers in Santiago (or indeed in South America at all), so I'd encourage you to sign up. If you say you're minimally excited/confident and someone else shows up who is more excited/confident they'll give them the slot, so don't worry about taking the job away from someone more "deserving" or whatever.
OK, gonna stop channeling Skyler now. :D
Oh no, don't stop if you're having fun, you seem to be doing alright at it! I think more people should emulate me in encouraging people to run ACX meetups. This is one of several traits I wish to inculcate in the world.
There is an effort to coordinate the (mostly tiny) European ACX meetups through an unofficial ACX Whatsapp community. It also includes a channel for the (mostly inexistent) Spanish-speaking ACX readers. Feel free to join and try to find some other South Americans there. And feel free to join and create a channel for Portuguese-speaking ACX readers.
https://chat.whatsapp.com/DiIdx2E7cAf3AgotxAAP89
You can fill out the form with 1 (out of 5) experience and 1 (out of 5) enthusiasm if you want. I don't know this is the case for Santiago, but I have seen cases where multiple people offered to help organize if someone else took the lead and . . . nobody took the lead, so it didn't happen.
Any demand for a meetup in Albuquerque? If so let me know and I can arrange a meetup and probably get a couple people from the local EA group to come.
However I'm the only person I know in abq who is more interested in an acx meetup than just doing another EA meetup. Thus I can't justify doing it unless there's some demand.
The best way I know of to figure out if there's demand for a meetup in a city is to have someone run an ACX Everywhere there and see. I'm obviously inclined to get more meetups on the margin (you don't get a role like ACX Meetups Czar by being the normal amount of interested in ACX meetups) but I think it's fine to try once a year and see what the demand is like.
What's the Albuquerque EA scene like?
We've got a handful of regulars and had a rare few meetups with up to like a dozen people, but more frequently we've had meetups with 2 or three people. Median is probably 4 if none of the regulars is busy. Last time we had a meetup was June 3rd.
I don't know if there are many ACX readers in the Inland Empire (California), but if there were a meetup in that area I'd probably come occasionally. The LA and Orange County meetups are rather far away for me...
Would you be willing to run a meetup there and see how many people show up? Sometimes people try running an ACX Everywhere in a new area and nobody shows up, but that just means sitting at a cafe or park for an hour or so with a book. Sometimes people get surprised- my favourite example here is Cavendish, a town of about a thousand people that had ten people show up to the ACX Everywhere.
I do not think I would be a very good meetup organizer (I am generally bad at carrying on conversations with strangers, and I'm a student with a pretty busy schedule on weekends and evenings when meetups would be happening). I'll think about it, though, and maybe sign up.
Very curious about Grass Valley, CA's 7.5 people in attendance in 2023!
Anyone else doing Canberra?
Not yet!
I know there are Indian readers here, though unsure how many from Mumbai. Nevertheless, have applied to organize an event in Mumbai on 27th Sep. Let's see!
Activities that take place in large numbers without organization will create bad effects. Should use https://fisheatfish.io
Hi, does anyone know if people have been contacted about organizing meetups yet? I signed up for one but haven't heard anything yet. Thanks!
ACX is organizing a series of meetups around the world. Organizers are needed by August 23rd to host events between https://www.paybyplatema.cx September 1st and October 31st.
Wow i am very excited for taking a part in this discussion this really fantastic and appreciating post so keep doing your work is best for more details you can visit: https://onstreamhd.app/onstream-for-ios/
I know of with the most women have a woman as the primary organizer. One of them has sometimes asked how to get more men to come and hopefully stay, which is an uncommon https://www-dailypay.com problem to say the least. I sometimes call this "founder effects are magic" because I can't figure out what exactly she's doing differently- if I was just looking at the announcement text and topics
The thoroughness of your analysis is truly impressive. It took me a little while to read all of the comments, but I found the article to be quite intriguing. https://pips-game.com
Sounds like the perfect push to stop lurking and just host one. The form looks easy, and even a low‑key coffee shop meetup is better than waiting for someone else. Count me in. https://sora-2-ai.com/