57 Comments
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Auspicious's avatar

Excited to be hosting the meetups in Miami and throughout South Florida! Anyone else in the area?

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David Cramer's avatar

bro what did Cassander do?? drama

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GlacierCow's avatar

Fitting that the DC meetup is at a tea place.

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David Cramer's avatar

got 'em!

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Jake's avatar

He executed Alexander IV and seized Macedon for himself.

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StrangeBanana's avatar

Also Heracles, Alexander's little-known other son by Barsine.

An asshole move, but one that was common to Macedonian succession.

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Darkside007's avatar

Threatened the ego of event co-ordinators closer to Scott.

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Benjamin Ikuta's avatar

I assume this is a joke or something, but what's the real reason?

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Darkside007's avatar

That's the real reason - Cass is much better at organizing meetups and events, so when one of the other organizers had a friend pushing for a sex party, they started rumors that Cass was hosting orgies and sexually harassing the other organizers. It was literally just a whisper campaign, but the people supporting it were closer to Scott than Cass, so Scott sided with them.

They're all still friends with the guy who actually wanted the sex parties, which I think says everything you need to know.

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Skyler's avatar

I disagree with this characterization of events.

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Paul Brinkley's avatar

The real reason is hard to determine, and you will get several Rashomonic accounts of that reason depending on whom you ask (as you're now getting from DS here). Some complete with fervent assertions that theirs is the real account, the other accounts are all impostors (shoot them!). They're all rationalists or rat-adjacent, meaning they have enough awareness to address that Rashomon effect with either grace or scoffs. And to top it off, there are privacy concerns that will preclude anyone from getting the full picture.

When I tried to dig into this like a disinterested third-party observer, I found at least four accounts that each had some pertinent information the others did not, and there were multiple issues folded together, and different rates at which each party discovered and responded to information. And again, privacy concerns, so if you think you have the full picture, you're certain to be mistaken, and the mistakes will be mind-changing ones. It's been five years, and I'm *still* turning up new stuff.

If you want something actionable, you'll probably do well enough by expecting Cass to host more events, they won't have the ACX / SSC label, but they'll still be fun, and even have a few rat- or rat-adjacent attendees. Meanwhile, don't dig for details. You won't find enough, and it'll just upset people.

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Hochreiter's avatar

More importantly, what group is Cassander's? There's this group in DC:

https://www.facebook.com/groups/433668130485595

Which is much larger than the (new?) Kayla one, and doesn't have a mention of this weekend's event, but it doesn't say it's run by Cassander and by all accounts seems pretty normal.

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Arthur Frank's avatar

The Berkeley, CA meet-up is listed as Thursday, September 9. Since September 9 is a Tuesday, either the date or the day of the week is incorrect. Which is it?

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Skyler's avatar

Tuesday.

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Arthur Frank's avatar

Thanks for the information.

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Brandon Reinhart's avatar

Nobody else in Vegas?

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Jonathan Ray's avatar

I usually host Vegas but I missed the email because I was on vacation. I filled it out just now. The meetup is Saturday Sept 27, 10am at Leone Cafe.

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Isaac King's avatar

The Berkley meetup is listed as on Thursday September 9th, but that's not a real day.

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Skyler's avatar

Not a real day *yet.* Growth mindset.

More seriously, it's Tuesday the 9th. There was a last-minute schedule change and I was working manually and in a hurry.

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Paul Brinkley's avatar

Daylight Savings Time is getting *really* draconian this year...

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Arbituram's avatar

I would be curious what the 'surprisingly biggest' meetup is (defined however you like). As in, are there a surprisingly disproportionate number of ACX readers in, say, Kuala Lumpur or Kampala? I could see it happening by a sort of random drift from local universities.

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Skyler's avatar

Historically I think Cavendish Vermont has punched the furthest above its weight class- ~1000 residents, ~10 attendees if memory serves. A few people from a research lab and a few people willing to drive were enough to bump it up.

I have a mixed confusion about the Asian meetups. By raw population, Hong Kong and Singapore should be topping the chart. English-fluency (or some other high level of English) population seems a better guide and is also harder to estimate- but my every attempt to estimate Asian English-primary and then generalize to other areas suggests that London and New York City should be something like an order of magnitude larger.

And then I start adding epicycles and controlling for lots of things and it turns into more guesswork and intuition than I'd like.

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Gian's avatar

Not Bangalore or Bombay ? --

Madras too has big population of English speakers.

So, I suppose you need to control for per capita GDP

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Steeven's avatar

Come to the Redwood City meetup! It’ll be fun

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Gaberber's avatar

Out of town on that day unfortunately but will this be a recurring event? Would love to join when I can

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Steeven's avatar

If I have fun at this one, it will be!

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Sniffnoy's avatar

As happens each time, the way the New York City meetups are listed is confusing. People expect to look under "New York City", not separately "Brooklyn" and "Manhattan" (maybe "Brooklyn", but definitely not "Manhattan"!).

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Auspicious's avatar

I was thinking the same about the Miami one, which is listed under "Coral Gables" (technically a different city but well within the Miami metropolitan area), a name that could be confusing for visitors or new residents.

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Kenny Easwaran's avatar

In Canada, he listed “Kitchener (see Waterloo)”. Seems like he could do “New York City (see Brooklyn and Manhattan)”.

Though also, both of those are close enough to New York alphabetically that you’ll see them if you try to flip to New York.

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Nicholas Lopez's avatar

Are there that many in New York State that this is a problem?

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Nicholas Lopez's avatar

There’s six. Classic.

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lizzard's avatar

The Nairobi contact's email doesn't look right. Could you confirm?

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Skyler's avatar

That's the email the organizer gave, and they replied to an email I sent to it.

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lizzard's avatar

Okay. Thanks

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Adil Oyango's avatar

That’s definitely my email :)

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Amanda From Bethlehem's avatar

Somebody started an Allentown (Pennsylvania) group!???

Well damn. Now I *have* to go to that one. It'll give me an excuse to drive up to Bethlehem for the day. 😅

(Bethlehem, PA is right next to Allentown.)

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Ross's avatar

Date for London meetup above is wrong -- should say "Saturday, September 13th" instead of "Friday, September 12th". That is the date you see if you follow the listed luma.com link (it would also be strange to have it on Friday when most folks are at work)

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Rushi's avatar

The Pittsburgh Discord URL might be broken, but here's the updated link: https://discord.gg/6yu[remove this bit]FhsRRJm

The email is still legit!

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Booker Lightman's avatar

Looks like we dropped the ball in Denver, we have our regular monthly meeting the first Wednesday at 7pm at 8769 W Cornell Ave, Lakewood, CO 80227-4813, the next one is Sept 3rd. If you come please make sure to use only the parking labelled VISITOR.

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Edmund  Nelson's avatar

today I learned jon's last name!

I'll be at Sunnyvale and San jose, i might hit berkeley (sadly I'm a bit far from BART, it's like a 1 hour bike ride)

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Matthieu again's avatar

Fun fact: while the list goes out of its way to put Istanbul in Europe and not in the Middle East like Ankara, the Istanbul meeting is in fact not in Europe.

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Skyler's avatar

Historically I fill the region out via me eyeballing it, and Turkey is one of maybe three groups where it isn't obvious. This year I put the region on the form and let the local organizer pick, only changing it if it looked like the organizer made an clear mistake. (Stuff like that happens.)

I might have asked the Turkish organizers to pick one region if I'd thought about it, but eh, seems fine. I put redirects in once people called my attention to it.

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Alex's avatar

How would one go creating a new meetup in a country? I live in northern Italy and am wondering if there are enough ACX readers in the area.

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Joey Marianer's avatar

tl;dr Pick a time and place, make a sign, and email the meetup czar Skyler Crossman <skyler@rationalitymeetups.org>. I'm not sure if they're updating this list for latecomers but asking is free, and if not you can at least post it here.

If you're very unlucky, you'll end up sitting in a coffee shop by yourself for an hour or two, so bring a laptop. Most likely you'll get one or two people (probably not as many as you would have gotten if you did this a week ago, unfortunately), and you can take it from there. Skyler is a great resource for what happens next, depending on how much effort you want to put into it.

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Skyler's avatar

This list gets updated with latecomers, and I expect it will be for a couple weeks. My guess is you get a few less people (since we can't change the email that already went out when the post happened) but don't have a sense of how many less.

I have have resources for high effort and resources for low effort :)

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Timothy Dexter's avatar

Anyone have an updated discord link for the Manhattan meetup? The old one doesn’t seem to work

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Michael Bond's avatar

The group link for Marietta is incorrect - there's no link at all, just show up! Feel free to email with any questions.

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Skyler's avatar

Hrm. Somehow that one wound up with Pittsburgh's group link and I do not know how, it's not there in the initial submission. My mistake somewhere, apologies!

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Michael Bond's avatar

No problem - thanks again for all your work putting this together!

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Logan's avatar

There's a Raleigh-Durham meetup on October 4 that I don't think is currently listed

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Skyler's avatar

Should be up now, I just did a collection sweep of the late additions.

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Timothy's avatar

Bonn organiser here. The above link for the Bonn group is broken, this one should work https://chat.whatsapp.com/F0K [remove this] VKLiuph59B72vUyR9Vh?mode=ems_copy_c

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Todd Nief's avatar

Chicago meetup (happening currently) is down the street since the original location is blocked off. We are at the southeast corner of Michigan and Balbo: https://plus.codes/86HJV9FG+4F

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Nadavovich's avatar

What an interesting experience that was! I was at the Boston meetup. It was a privilege to meet with David, who is obviously a brilliant individual. It left me feeling sort of depressed though.

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Shana Brush's avatar

This was a nice blog. I have gone through all the websites and posted the comment which matches my niche. https://www.hhaexchange.com.co

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Moot Verick's avatar

Again, I am at Hyderabad's meetup spot and nobody is here. Oh well.

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Adam's avatar

**Salt Lake City update**: Due to chance of rain, we will now meet in the **City Creek Food Court, southwest corner**. Date/time is still this Saturday Oct 11th, 3:00pm.

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