I'd be happy to host one. But, I'm in central Florida. Between now and about mid-October, very few people would willingly attend anything outside other than walking from a parking spot to an air-conditioned building ( I may be the exception...but still...). Will there be another call for meetups in the autumn or winter?
What about places like Seattle which are cold and rainy from October to April? You can realistically meetup in August and September but after that it has to be indoor-only. Would you be open to publicizing an indoor meetup if outdoor stuff is out of the question realistically speaking?
Seattle rarely gets so cold that I'm unwilling to be outside. Depending on how many people are interested in attending/show up to events in August or September, it might be possible to do meetups in colder months in an open-air picnic shelter or something similar. I've been singing with a small group in Meridian Park and their shelter looks like it would keep 30 or 40 people out of the rain with a bit of distancing.
I'm also in this boat. No one in my state will willingly do anything outdoors in the next two months. I would be willing to play host but the timing doesn't work.
As a Tampa Bay resident, I recommend a waterfront park. With a little luck, there will be enough of a breeze off the water to keep the bugs away. Then all you need to worry about is the neurotoxins from the red tide…
David an I showed up to the Tampa meetup. Didn’t see anybody else there, but we had some Ūlëlē chili, which was excellent, and talked about SSC/ACX, GMU economists’ blogs, and a few other rationalism-adjacent things.
Are there any beach cafes with outdoor seating open past sunset in your area? I've been to hangouts in Tel-Aviv during the heat of summer which were awesome thanks to being held in outdoor cafes on the shore. You still sweat but there's a nice breeze from the ocean :)
Also in FL (roughly central) and though I would be willing to attend what would surely be a delightfully sweaty outdoor meetup at more or less any time, I can appreciate that I'm probably in the minority. October sounds great to me.
I encourage you to fill out the form! It'll be closing pretty soon, and no one from the east coast of central Florida has volunteered to organize yet :)
Would people be interested in more than one of these? The above user is doing Tampa, I could host one in Orlando. I'm not sure if that conflicts too much, or if other Florida people have a preference. We could probably do something at UCF.
I think you should go for it. Most people are not going to drive from Orlando to Tampa. Plus, there are possibly people in other nearby areas that may be interested. And some Tampa people may even come join you.
This is going to be an interesting survey of whether Floridians participate here in any number. :)
We already have a meetup scheduled in Salt Lake City, UT, USA for this Saturday 8/14. It's at 996 South Donner Way at 3 pm. Contact me @ we are not saved (all one word) at gmail for additional details. Beyond that the SLC meetups are the second saturday of every _even_ month.
I resubmitted with an 8/28 date, but we're still having a meetup on the 14th, which is partially why I posted in the comments. So feel free to come to both. (Should anyone in SLC see this.)
What if you live in a town that's reasonably close enough to a city that had a meetup? You'd like to organize a meetup in your town, but if it looks like it's going to flop is it acceptable to cancel and redirect everyone to the one in the nearby city? (e.g. in this case I'd redirect to Portland Oregon)
Great to see more CH-based people here - it looks like we'll have one in Geneva's Parc La Grange on Sep 17th at 18:30. If it's raining, we can move onto the Ella Fitzgerald stage or to the Buvette of the Orangerie (not sure the latter one will still be open).
We will meet near the entrance to the Orangerie, next to the Monkey Puzzle tree (Araucaria araucana). I will be wearing a green t-shirt/sweater and carrying a sign with "ACX Meetup" on it.
I'm trying to decide whether it's worthwhile for me to host one in Bryan/College Station, TX (home of Texas A&M University). I see that West Lafayette, IN (home of Purdue University) and Iowa City (home of University of Iowa) each had 2 attendees. But then I see that Houston only had 3, despite being a much larger city, so I worry that this region of Texas might just have fewer readers than midwestern university towns. Since I spent the last six months living temporarily in Austin and have plans to spend more time visiting there generally in the future, and the Austin one had 60 attendees, I might just drop the idea of trying to do one here and just go there instead.
Is there anyone who went to one of the two or three person meetups that had a good enough time to decide that it was worthwhile? Is there anyone who attended both a big one in a nearby city and a small one on a different date, who has opinions on whether merging or splitting is better in these cases?
If by some chance anyone who reads this comment would want to come to a Bryan/College Station meetup, I'll take that as sufficient reason to volunteer to host one, and make sure the time and location I list are good for both of us!
I guess it depends on what you're optimizing for. I've been to a 3-person meetup in Europe and the San Francisco meetup (these were both annual, blog-promoted meetups). The 3-person meetup was by far the better (more impactful?) experience for me. It was the first opportunity I had to meet other SSC readers, or even anyone with similar enough interests that they'd be interested in SSC.
Hey, I am in BCS and I would be interested in coming to a meetup. I vaguely suspect there may be others interested given the size of the university, but who knows.
Great! I'm happy to discuss date/location in this thread, or via e-mail. (Mine is last name at either gmail or university, or you can google me or look me up on the university website.)
If it were entirely designed for me, I would propose meeting at Savage Brew Lab, a nice new outdoor beer garden just south of downtown Bryan, on a Friday evening, when they've got the pizza kitchen operating. I'm pretty sure that you only need to be 21 to buy alcoholic drinks, and not to enter the space, or buy pizza or non-alcoholic drinks (my friends usually bring their baby), but the biggest downside is that it's several miles from campus and might not get students who don't have cars.
Is there a place in Northgate with similarly pleasant shaded seating and non-alcoholic options for people who don't want to drink? Torchy's might be good if there's a time of the week that's good for people, and it's not crowded.
I expect it makes sense to be in mid-September, after everyone's been through the first week or two of the semester and things have hopefully calmed down a bit.
Previous organizers, do people typically let you know they are coming or do they just show up? I'd like to bring an appropriate amount of pastries if I end up being an organizer.
In my experience as organizer (not of ACX), the best solution is to tell people "bring some food" instead of trying to provide enough for everyone. If few people show up, a dozen pastries will suffice. If 50 people show up, at least 10 will bring up some food, leaving enough for everyone. As a worst case scenario you can always order a pizza delivery to the meetup. Trust me - people don't mind if there's not enough food or drinks :-)
Our rough estimate is that about twice as many people will come as RSVP. We do our meetups in our home, so are pretty flexible on how many people we end up feeding dinner to.
Do we have any way of figuring out ahead of time if people will come/is it acceptable to set a minimum number of RSVPs? I live in Athens Georgia, and I just can’t imagine there are enough (if any) ACX readers nearby to justify a meetup, but I’d be happy to organize one just to see what it’s like if people were interested
It would be neat if someone smart and motivated figured out a way to make an ACX Meetup Assurance Contract Interactive Map type thingy, which would maybe help solve similar problems happening everywhere.
The DC group is holding our monthly meetup this Saturday at 1002 N street NW at 7pm. Come one, come all, the bourbon is free! You can join the private mailing lists at either of these groups:
We've talked with the community here and decided that september 18th would work better, we'd like to modify our proposal. @johnofcharleston submitted a second request.
We expect to be doing another South Bay meetup at some point, but at the moment infection rates are still going up so we are putting it off for a while. Anyone who wants to be on the mailing list and isn't can email me at ddfr@daviddfriedman.com.
Ngl, I’m submitting a meet up in south Los Angeles solely because within a set of ACX readers there’s gotta be a least a few chess players. I’ll bring my board and hope.
Looks like there are at least three readers in Buenos Aires who'd be interested, but no one has volunteered to organize yet! @strikingLoo, will you be a hero and fill out the form?
For reasons that are definitely 100% related to covid safety, Hong Kong allows indoor gatherings but not outdoor gatherings. Hong Kong also has not had an instance of local transmission of covid in several weeks. Would you tolerate an exception for Hong Kong for an indoor meetup as long as it obeys the local laws?
I'm the organizer for the Los Angeles LW/ACX meetup (and have already filled out the form), but for more context: we're currently having our meetups on Discord (https://discord.gg/TaYjsvN) every Wednesday at 7 pm, and will resume in-person meetups when the covid situation permits. It's possible that I'll figure out a good outdoor venue before then, but it doesn't make a lot of sense to commit to a date and location when the situation is changing so rapidly. I'll keep whatever resource (i.e. spreadsheet) is provided up-to-date but the Google Group (https://groups.google.com/g/LW-SoCal-Announce) and Lesswrong Community page (https://www.lesswrong.com/groups/GSN7BypgiJcjEiRRS) are also reliable ways to keep track of when we resume in-person meetups if you can't join us online.
I've attended meetups in Columbus and St. Louis in the past, but I'm currently located in Cleveland for the next several months. I see on the form that Cleveland meetups have taken place in the past. Is there a preexisting community here?
I can think of an open field to host the meetup in but I don't want to intrude on anyone else's turf.
Thanks! If you set up a meetup I'll try to come, if not I'll try to attend one of the regular ones sooner or later. If there will be a GPN next year in Karlsruhe I'll be there too, maybe we can use that for a meetup.
In case anyone from Oxford, UK is free tonight (Wed 11th Aug), a few of us are meeting at the Isis Farmhouse at 7pm, there'll be a copy of Sidgwick on the table.
We'll probably run another in October, stay tuned.
Oh fun! I'd love to host a meetup near Buffalo NY. (Java Center, about 45 min drive SE of Buf.) I would also love to go to some other meetup in the area... Buffalo or Rochester. I'm flexible on the date (if there is any interest) but will pick Sun. Sept. 5th for the form. I live in a little piece of paradise with woods, fields, a stream and waterfalls so hiking boots and or creek shoes would be encouraged. I also have two (or three) friendly dogs, which might be a problem for some people.
> According to the recent surveys, 97% of ACX readers in the US are vaccinated.
Note that this means 97% of ACX readers in the US *who chose to take the survey* are vaccinated, and there is reason to think those would be correlated.
Good question. I'd expect not as strongly - taking the survey and vaccination both feel conscientiousness and data-driven-ness related, while going to the meetup is more about social desires.
Both are participatory though, so I would expect some correlation, just a weaker one.
I am posting in the comments (rather than responding to the form) to say:
I really do not want to organize another meet-up but in the event there is nobody who volunteers in Toronto, I will try and personally find someone to volunteer.
Am I the only ACX reader who thinks this post is an example of cult-like behavior?
Scott, you're trying to dictate the circumstances under which your readers can gather and interact in the real world. Try to see this from an outsider's perspective. Imagine if Curtis Yarvin posted something like this, with the attendant bizarro-world alterations.
I really enjoy your writing, and I think a lot of it is brilliant and insightful, but this kind of thing really makes me wonder if you've been compromised by your self reliant situation.
Nobody is trying to dictate anything. Particularly your claim that Scott is dictating when readers "can" gather is just completely wrong.
The point of this post is to establish a Schelling point for meetups. Meetups are a kind of coordination problem, so it can be useful to have a time and place everyone is aware of as preferred. But the Scott doesn't *dictate* the preference; people prefer it *because* Scott said it and they know how Schelling points work. There are absolutely no negative consequences associated with holding a meetup at another time, except you will be less able to gather attendees, and that's simply not something that Scott carries responsibility for.
"people prefer it *because* Scott said it"...yeah, that's pretty much my point. if you belong to a group in which the members of the group need their leader to set up get-togethers for them, well that sounds cult-like to me. but then I don't live in the bay area or even on the west coast, so maybe this is a cultural difference.
> If you can put a name/time/date in a box on Google Forms and show up there, you have the minimum skill necessary to be a meetup organizer for your city
As for small towns, I'm not Scott, but I can't imagine there's a minimum size requirement (Especially if there are no big cities where you'd draw attention away from). If you're ok with the possibility of nobody showing up I'd just go for it.
For Boston / Cambridge, MA folks: we are doing a meetup on Sunday Aug 22 at 1pm at John F Kennedy Park ahead of the "Meetups Everywhere" event in September: https://www.facebook.com/events/1268190630262997
We have an email too now - bostonacx @ gmail.com - shoot a message to be put on our email list.
"I will request that only vaccinated people attend these meetups - but knowing that I can’t enforce this, it makes me reassured to learn that almost everyone is vaccinated anyway."
In Germany there's a standard for events to receive people to be either be vaccinated (sometimes 'fully' vaccinated, sometimes requiring at least two doses), be tested at the same day or have had COVID-19 in the last 6 months.
Are you articulating a preference for excluding nonvaccinated but tested people?
(In Germany people can show their status with a mobile phone, so it's relatively easy to enforce this for meetup organizers if it's desired)
I'd be happy to host one. But, I'm in central Florida. Between now and about mid-October, very few people would willingly attend anything outside other than walking from a parking spot to an air-conditioned building ( I may be the exception...but still...). Will there be another call for meetups in the autumn or winter?
I think it would be fair for you fill out the form scheduling the Florida meetup for late October.
What about places like Seattle which are cold and rainy from October to April? You can realistically meetup in August and September but after that it has to be indoor-only. Would you be open to publicizing an indoor meetup if outdoor stuff is out of the question realistically speaking?
Why don't you just schedule it for August or September then?
I’m assuming the idea is to host a monthly meet up? If it’s a one time event then sure - one time in august is more than enough!
Seattle rarely gets so cold that I'm unwilling to be outside. Depending on how many people are interested in attending/show up to events in August or September, it might be possible to do meetups in colder months in an open-air picnic shelter or something similar. I've been singing with a small group in Meridian Park and their shelter looks like it would keep 30 or 40 people out of the rain with a bit of distancing.
A rain shelter would be a game changer. Agreed that outside of a few cold waves it’s fine outdoors, but you need a rooftop.
I'm also in this boat. No one in my state will willingly do anything outdoors in the next two months. I would be willing to play host but the timing doesn't work.
If there's no way to make it work (eg schedule for after it gets dark), then schedule for October.
After dark can be even worse...we have insects that love swarming in the dark (don't you wish you lived here? ;-) )
I'll sign up with an eye toward October.
As a Tampa Bay resident, I recommend a waterfront park. With a little luck, there will be enough of a breeze off the water to keep the bugs away. Then all you need to worry about is the neurotoxins from the red tide…
I scheduled it for the park in front of Ulele…waterfront. Scheduled for 10/2
So happy to see this! I just went over the old form and there was no Central Florida Meetup. Halloween ACX GO!
I scheduled Saturday Oct 2 in downtown Tampa. (I figured close to Halloween might be a bit tight for people scheduling wise).
Which is exactly why you had the chops to fill out the form and not me!
David an I showed up to the Tampa meetup. Didn’t see anybody else there, but we had some Ūlëlē chili, which was excellent, and talked about SSC/ACX, GMU economists’ blogs, and a few other rationalism-adjacent things.
Are there any beach cafes with outdoor seating open past sunset in your area? I've been to hangouts in Tel-Aviv during the heat of summer which were awesome thanks to being held in outdoor cafes on the shore. You still sweat but there's a nice breeze from the ocean :)
There are a few, but because of the lack of other settings, they will be packed.
Also in FL (roughly central) and though I would be willing to attend what would surely be a delightfully sweaty outdoor meetup at more or less any time, I can appreciate that I'm probably in the minority. October sounds great to me.
Oh, I'm in south florida, a few hours away from Orlando, I might be willing to come out depending on the details.
Also in East coast of central Florida: Sebastian. Would love to meet up, even if only with one other person.
I encourage you to fill out the form! It'll be closing pretty soon, and no one from the east coast of central Florida has volunteered to organize yet :)
Expressing interest, here, just to hope that I'll retain it.
Would people be interested in more than one of these? The above user is doing Tampa, I could host one in Orlando. I'm not sure if that conflicts too much, or if other Florida people have a preference. We could probably do something at UCF.
I would attend one at UCF more than Tampa, actually. I'm all up for it! Maybe a different weekend than Tampa?
Alright then, I think I will! I'll just have to put a bit more thought into the when.
No one has filled out the form for Orlando yet! The form will be closing in ~a day, so this is a reminder to fill it out :)
Thanks for the reminder! I was waffling about exact place/time, but I've put it in now. :)
I think you should go for it. Most people are not going to drive from Orlando to Tampa. Plus, there are possibly people in other nearby areas that may be interested. And some Tampa people may even come join you.
This is going to be an interesting survey of whether Floridians participate here in any number. :)
I'd prefer Orlando to Tampa, yeah.
We already have a meetup scheduled in Salt Lake City, UT, USA for this Saturday 8/14. It's at 996 South Donner Way at 3 pm. Contact me @ we are not saved (all one word) at gmail for additional details. Beyond that the SLC meetups are the second saturday of every _even_ month.
I can't publicize an August 14 meetup. Please either change the date, reschedule for later, or fill in the form again for your October meetup.
I resubmitted with an 8/28 date, but we're still having a meetup on the 14th, which is partially why I posted in the comments. So feel free to come to both. (Should anyone in SLC see this.)
What if you live in a town that's reasonably close enough to a city that had a meetup? You'd like to organize a meetup in your town, but if it looks like it's going to flop is it acceptable to cancel and redirect everyone to the one in the nearby city? (e.g. in this case I'd redirect to Portland Oregon)
I don't know how you would figure out if it was going to flop beforehand. I think we should default to having meetups in the cities that held successful ones in 2019 - you can see the list at https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1MmRNJVvnRNJ-jDVGQj1fI-eCuibn1PdipMxqC3nK-KQ/edit#gid=0
Corvallis, Oregon by chance?
Good guess, but Eugene actually.
Very cool, we just decided at our last online meetup (for Zürich) that we were having the next one in person if at all possible.
Just volunteered to do in-person for Geneva, so if you have anybody from my side of the country pass them along.
Not promising anything, but I might show up over at yours.
Great to see more CH-based people here - it looks like we'll have one in Geneva's Parc La Grange on Sep 17th at 18:30. If it's raining, we can move onto the Ella Fitzgerald stage or to the Buvette of the Orangerie (not sure the latter one will still be open).
Precise location I submitted: https://w3w.co/soucieux.pr%C3%A9parer.appeler
We will meet near the entrance to the Orangerie, next to the Monkey Puzzle tree (Araucaria araucana). I will be wearing a green t-shirt/sweater and carrying a sign with "ACX Meetup" on it.
Does it mean there’s already a Zürich meetup volunteer then?
Yes. We're doing the meetup (roughly) on our normal schedule, so it will take place october 9.
I'm trying to decide whether it's worthwhile for me to host one in Bryan/College Station, TX (home of Texas A&M University). I see that West Lafayette, IN (home of Purdue University) and Iowa City (home of University of Iowa) each had 2 attendees. But then I see that Houston only had 3, despite being a much larger city, so I worry that this region of Texas might just have fewer readers than midwestern university towns. Since I spent the last six months living temporarily in Austin and have plans to spend more time visiting there generally in the future, and the Austin one had 60 attendees, I might just drop the idea of trying to do one here and just go there instead.
Is there anyone who went to one of the two or three person meetups that had a good enough time to decide that it was worthwhile? Is there anyone who attended both a big one in a nearby city and a small one on a different date, who has opinions on whether merging or splitting is better in these cases?
If by some chance anyone who reads this comment would want to come to a Bryan/College Station meetup, I'll take that as sufficient reason to volunteer to host one, and make sure the time and location I list are good for both of us!
I guess it depends on what you're optimizing for. I've been to a 3-person meetup in Europe and the San Francisco meetup (these were both annual, blog-promoted meetups). The 3-person meetup was by far the better (more impactful?) experience for me. It was the first opportunity I had to meet other SSC readers, or even anyone with similar enough interests that they'd be interested in SSC.
I'm surprised there is not already a rat-themed meetup in College Station. Maybe advertise at the computer science club or something?
Hey, I am in BCS and I would be interested in coming to a meetup. I vaguely suspect there may be others interested given the size of the university, but who knows.
Great! I'm happy to discuss date/location in this thread, or via e-mail. (Mine is last name at either gmail or university, or you can google me or look me up on the university website.)
If it were entirely designed for me, I would propose meeting at Savage Brew Lab, a nice new outdoor beer garden just south of downtown Bryan, on a Friday evening, when they've got the pizza kitchen operating. I'm pretty sure that you only need to be 21 to buy alcoholic drinks, and not to enter the space, or buy pizza or non-alcoholic drinks (my friends usually bring their baby), but the biggest downside is that it's several miles from campus and might not get students who don't have cars.
Is there a place in Northgate with similarly pleasant shaded seating and non-alcoholic options for people who don't want to drink? Torchy's might be good if there's a time of the week that's good for people, and it's not crowded.
I expect it makes sense to be in mid-September, after everyone's been through the first week or two of the semester and things have hopefully calmed down a bit.
Reminder about this! The organizer volunteering form will be closing soon and no one has filled it out for Bryan/College Station :)
Previous organizers, do people typically let you know they are coming or do they just show up? I'd like to bring an appropriate amount of pastries if I end up being an organizer.
almost no one will RSVP. it's very annoying.
In my experience as organizer (not of ACX), the best solution is to tell people "bring some food" instead of trying to provide enough for everyone. If few people show up, a dozen pastries will suffice. If 50 people show up, at least 10 will bring up some food, leaving enough for everyone. As a worst case scenario you can always order a pizza delivery to the meetup. Trust me - people don't mind if there's not enough food or drinks :-)
Our rough estimate is that about twice as many people will come as RSVP. We do our meetups in our home, so are pretty flexible on how many people we end up feeding dinner to.
Do we have any way of figuring out ahead of time if people will come/is it acceptable to set a minimum number of RSVPs? I live in Athens Georgia, and I just can’t imagine there are enough (if any) ACX readers nearby to justify a meetup, but I’d be happy to organize one just to see what it’s like if people were interested
*host one
SSC Atlanta will be hosting one - details to come soon
I suspected Atlanta might have one; the problem is that I don’t own a car, and I’m definitely not hardcore enough to bike in
It would be neat if someone smart and motivated figured out a way to make an ACX Meetup Assurance Contract Interactive Map type thingy, which would maybe help solve similar problems happening everywhere.
Hey I'm in Athens too! I was just thinking the same thing, actually. If someone were to organize one, I'd definitely try to come.
The DC group is holding our monthly meetup this Saturday at 1002 N street NW at 7pm. Come one, come all, the bourbon is free! You can join the private mailing lists at either of these groups:
https://groups.google.com/u/1/g/dc-slatestarcodex
https://www.facebook.com/groups/433668130485595/
I've signed up for 23 of October, which is when the DSL community is going to be doing our first meetup.
We'll also do something for September, which might be a better fit for the Meetups Everywhere. Will update.
@scott alexander
We've talked with the community here and decided that september 18th would work better, we'd like to modify our proposal. @johnofcharleston submitted a second request.
We expect to be doing another South Bay meetup at some point, but at the moment infection rates are still going up so we are putting it off for a while. Anyone who wants to be on the mailing list and isn't can email me at ddfr@daviddfriedman.com.
Ngl, I’m submitting a meet up in south Los Angeles solely because within a set of ACX readers there’s gotta be a least a few chess players. I’ll bring my board and hope.
Is playing online a significantly inferior experience for you?
Yes. I miss the kibitzing, the feel of hard wood pieces, the casual commentary during play.
Lichess is amazing but insufficient.
Are there any other readers from Argentina who may like to do a meetup?
Buenos Aires, ciudad!
CABA
Sure. I've been spending the pandemic in Villa Sarmiento but live in Capital.
Looks like there are at least three readers in Buenos Aires who'd be interested, but no one has volunteered to organize yet! @strikingLoo, will you be a hero and fill out the form?
For reasons that are definitely 100% related to covid safety, Hong Kong allows indoor gatherings but not outdoor gatherings. Hong Kong also has not had an instance of local transmission of covid in several weeks. Would you tolerate an exception for Hong Kong for an indoor meetup as long as it obeys the local laws?
Yes.
I'm the organizer for the Los Angeles LW/ACX meetup (and have already filled out the form), but for more context: we're currently having our meetups on Discord (https://discord.gg/TaYjsvN) every Wednesday at 7 pm, and will resume in-person meetups when the covid situation permits. It's possible that I'll figure out a good outdoor venue before then, but it doesn't make a lot of sense to commit to a date and location when the situation is changing so rapidly. I'll keep whatever resource (i.e. spreadsheet) is provided up-to-date but the Google Group (https://groups.google.com/g/LW-SoCal-Announce) and Lesswrong Community page (https://www.lesswrong.com/groups/GSN7BypgiJcjEiRRS) are also reliable ways to keep track of when we resume in-person meetups if you can't join us online.
Looking at Scott's link to old meetup data (https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1MmRNJVvnRNJ-jDVGQj1fI-eCuibn1PdipMxqC3nK-KQ/edit#gid=0), it looks like there's absolutely bupkiss in the Denver area --- or really, all of colorado. Is that still the case, or is it worth trying to organize one here?
Someone's already volunteered for Denver.
Not a chance there's anyone else here from Kiryat Gat is there?
There's usually a Tel Aviv meetup.
Could do one next Greenberg gathering if not :P
Who is this? :-)
Adina :)
I've attended meetups in Columbus and St. Louis in the past, but I'm currently located in Cleveland for the next several months. I see on the form that Cleveland meetups have taken place in the past. Is there a preexisting community here?
I can think of an open field to host the meetup in but I don't want to intrude on anyone else's turf.
No one has volunteered in Cleveland yet; you should go ahead and fill out the form! :)
Anyone interested in a meetup in Karlsruhe or Freiburg, Germany?
Yes, There is a Rationality Group in Karlsruhe and we are planning on joining here as well, we are not yet sure about the date
Thanks! If you set up a meetup I'll try to come, if not I'll try to attend one of the regular ones sooner or later. If there will be a GPN next year in Karlsruhe I'll be there too, maybe we can use that for a meetup.
Hey Markus, just a reminder that the organizer volunteer form is closing soon and no one has filled it out for Karlsruhe yet! :)
Thanks for the reminder, I just filled it out.
In case anyone from Oxford, UK is free tonight (Wed 11th Aug), a few of us are meeting at the Isis Farmhouse at 7pm, there'll be a copy of Sidgwick on the table.
We'll probably run another in October, stay tuned.
https://www.facebook.com/groups/1221768638031684
(To be clear: we'll be sitting at the benches out the front, and I doubt we'll talk about the Sidgwick)
Just wondering if your copy of Sidgwick is along the lines of a clone, or perhaps just a hologram?
If I remember the conversation correctly: a 2D projection of a brain-state at a single moment in time.
Which is unfortunate, as the kitchen closed before we'd ordered food.
any other Phnom Penh ACXers?
What is an ACX meetup?
An in-person get-together for fans of this blog. The "ten" in the name is presented as the Roman numeral X.
Hah I always thought that the X was from codeX, and that ACX was adopted because it made for a snazzier acronym than ACT
I think it's a combination of all three factors making this a good acronym.
Oh fun! I'd love to host a meetup near Buffalo NY. (Java Center, about 45 min drive SE of Buf.) I would also love to go to some other meetup in the area... Buffalo or Rochester. I'm flexible on the date (if there is any interest) but will pick Sun. Sept. 5th for the form. I live in a little piece of paradise with woods, fields, a stream and waterfalls so hiking boots and or creek shoes would be encouraged. I also have two (or three) friendly dogs, which might be a problem for some people.
> According to the recent surveys, 97% of ACX readers in the US are vaccinated.
Note that this means 97% of ACX readers in the US *who chose to take the survey* are vaccinated, and there is reason to think those would be correlated.
So would “ACX folk who would take the survey” and “ACX folk who would go to a meet up” correlate strongly or no?
Good question. I'd expect not as strongly - taking the survey and vaccination both feel conscientiousness and data-driven-ness related, while going to the meetup is more about social desires.
Both are participatory though, so I would expect some correlation, just a weaker one.
I am posting in the comments (rather than responding to the form) to say:
I really do not want to organize another meet-up but in the event there is nobody who volunteers in Toronto, I will try and personally find someone to volunteer.
Am I the only ACX reader who thinks this post is an example of cult-like behavior?
Scott, you're trying to dictate the circumstances under which your readers can gather and interact in the real world. Try to see this from an outsider's perspective. Imagine if Curtis Yarvin posted something like this, with the attendant bizarro-world alterations.
I really enjoy your writing, and I think a lot of it is brilliant and insightful, but this kind of thing really makes me wonder if you've been compromised by your self reliant situation.
Nobody is trying to dictate anything. Particularly your claim that Scott is dictating when readers "can" gather is just completely wrong.
The point of this post is to establish a Schelling point for meetups. Meetups are a kind of coordination problem, so it can be useful to have a time and place everyone is aware of as preferred. But the Scott doesn't *dictate* the preference; people prefer it *because* Scott said it and they know how Schelling points work. There are absolutely no negative consequences associated with holding a meetup at another time, except you will be less able to gather attendees, and that's simply not something that Scott carries responsibility for.
"people prefer it *because* Scott said it"...yeah, that's pretty much my point. if you belong to a group in which the members of the group need their leader to set up get-togethers for them, well that sounds cult-like to me. but then I don't live in the bay area or even on the west coast, so maybe this is a cultural difference.
I live in Germany.
You're literally complaining that Scott used his position as "the guy who writes what we read" to do something nice that helps us.
> Am I the only ACX reader who thinks this post is an example of cult-like behavior?
Yes.
do we need to know /anything/ to host a meetup? what would they be about anyway?
also, is it ok to host one in [ok outside of] a quite small out of the way town? in the uk?
> If you can put a name/time/date in a box on Google Forms and show up there, you have the minimum skill necessary to be a meetup organizer for your city
As for small towns, I'm not Scott, but I can't imagine there's a minimum size requirement (Especially if there are no big cities where you'd draw attention away from). If you're ok with the possibility of nobody showing up I'd just go for it.
It's the UK, how far out of the way can it be?
(Also I volunteered for Newcastle, the least rational place in the world, and am expecting the attendees to be me and some pigeons.)
For Boston / Cambridge, MA folks: we are doing a meetup on Sunday Aug 22 at 1pm at John F Kennedy Park ahead of the "Meetups Everywhere" event in September: https://www.facebook.com/events/1268190630262997
We have an email too now - bostonacx @ gmail.com - shoot a message to be put on our email list.
Is there a current list for meetups?
Post says one should be posted on the 23rd
"I will request that only vaccinated people attend these meetups - but knowing that I can’t enforce this, it makes me reassured to learn that almost everyone is vaccinated anyway."
In Germany there's a standard for events to receive people to be either be vaccinated (sometimes 'fully' vaccinated, sometimes requiring at least two doses), be tested at the same day or have had COVID-19 in the last 6 months.
Are you articulating a preference for excluding nonvaccinated but tested people?
(In Germany people can show their status with a mobile phone, so it's relatively easy to enforce this for meetup organizers if it's desired)