Bias Culture Toward Desired Marginals

Screwtape, as the global ACX meetups czar, has to be reasonable and responsible in his advice giving for running meetups.

And the advice is great! It is unobjectionably great.

I am here to give you more objectionable advice, as another organizer who's run two weekend retreats and a cool hundred rationality meetups over the last two years. As the advice is objectionable (in that, I can see reasonable people disagreeing with it), please read with the appropriate amount of skepticism.

Don't do anything you find annoying

If any piece of advice on running "good" meetups makes you go "aurgh", just don't do those things. Supplying food, having meetups on a regular scheduled basis, doing more than just hosting board game nights, building organizational capacity, honestly who even cares. If you don't want to do those things, don't! It's completely fine to disappoint your dad. Screwtape is not even your real dad.

I've run several weekend-long megameetups now, and after the last one I realized that I really hate dealing with lodging. So I am just going to not do that going forwards and trust people to figure out sleeping space for themselves. Sure, this is less ideal. But you [...]

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Outline:

(00:41) Dont do anything you find annoying

(02:08) Boss people around

(06:11) Do not accommodate people who dont do the readings

(07:36) Make people read stuff outside the rationality canon at least sometimes

(08:11) Do closed meetups at least sometimes

(09:29) Experiment with group rationality at least sometimes

(10:18) Bias the culture towards the marginal rat(s) you want

The original text contained 4 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.

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First published:
December 19th, 2025

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/HmXhnc3XaZnEwe8eM/opinionated-takes-on-meetups-organizing

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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