Didn’t we just do this? No, that was college effective altruist group meetups. These are the normal meetups for ineffective selfish people of all ages. So here is your regularly-scheduled message from Meetups Czar Skyler:
Short version! If you’re willing to organizer an ACX Everywhere meetup for your city, please fill out the organizer form by October 9th.
The plan is:
Interested organizers fill out the form by October 9th
The list of meetups gets published around October 10th
The meetups themselves take place anywhere between October 16th and November 30th
People have more meetups and have more fun throughout the year.
The form will ask you for a time, date, location, and a way to contact you. It will ask other things too like how excited you are to run a meetup and what kind of meetups you like running.
I usually say organizing an ACX Everywhere meetup can be pretty easy. Open socials like these are the easiest kinds of meetups to run since you don’t need to prepare any kind of activity or discussion questions, and you don’t need to work hard advertising it since Scott and I will be doing a lot of that for you.
What hasn’t been said in one of these posts is it can be pretty rewarding as well. Obviously I’m the kind of person who winds up with a title like “ACX Meetup Czar” so you can guess I like meetups more than the average person, but most regular organizers report enjoying the experience. You get to meet new people who are into the same ~~obscure blog~~ widely read publication as you are. There’s the appreciation of your peers to consider; I’m an ex-theatre kid and Boston has taken to applauding the organizers at the midpoint of ACX Everywhere. Plus there’s the convenience of the meetup happening at a time that works for you and a place you know you can get to.
Also, while running one ACX Everywhere meetup does not mean you’re signing up to be a meetup organizer forever, if you do choose to keep running events you may find that the group mysteriously ends up mostly full of your kind of people, even more than it being an ACX group would lead you to expect. Founder effects are impressive.
Q. What do I need in order to be an okay meetup organizer?
A. You need to be able to pick a time and a date and a local cafe or park, write “ACX” on a piece of paper with a sharpie, and show up. The sign is honestly optional, it’s just recommended. There are ways to screw this up but if you’re the kind of person who’s anxious about making everyone uncomfortable, I don’t think you’re going to do that. I am a rationalist, I pride myself on calibration, and without having met you I’m 99% confident you’re going to do at least okay.
Q. What do I need in order to be a great meetup organizer?
A. Lots of things can improve a meetup, none of which are necessary. Bring name tags and a sharpie to help folks feel less awkward about forgetting names. Make sure there’s water, either because you’re at a restaurant or because there’s a water fountain or because you brought a case or two of plastic water bottles. Snacks can also be great. (I can reimburse the water bottles and name tags and snacks, though I’m very slow at it this year.) Be warm and friendly with newcomers, learn how long they’ve been reading ACX or what their hobbies are. Have a way for attendees to join a mailing list or whatsapp group or the like where you or someone else can announce future meetups in your city. This list is not exhaustive. I have more advice if you want it.
Q. When should the meetup happen?
A. The meetup should take place sometime between October 16th and November 30th.
Q. Where should the meetup happen?
A. The best venues are
easy to get to
not so loud that people have trouble hearing
have things like places to sit and access to water or toilets, and
make it easy to move from conversation to conversation.
Public parks are great, especially if they’re close to a cafe people can duck into if they want refreshments or if it starts raining. Some parks have water fountains and pavilions to keep out the rain. Mall food courts or common areas work pretty well. Apartments or houses can be great, but it does involve posting your address on the internet. Pubs or bars can work, but tend to be worse for college students or parents with children.
Q. What should happen at the meetup?
A. Basically just show up and talk. ACX readers tend to be interesting people. If you’re worried about this, a few suggestions are:
Hand out nametags, and ask people to write a topic they want to talk about on the nametag.
Get a few books and leave them lying around with “Have you read me?” written on a sticky note.
Say hello to newcomers as they arrive, introduce yourself, and ask them something about themselves.
For ACX Everywhere, I’d warn against trying to make everyone do some mandatory activity like watching a PowerPoint presentation. That said, it’s fine to give people the option to do something other than unstructured socializing. I sometimes leave a few games lying on a table.
Q. What if there’s already an existing ACX group near me?
A. You may want to volunteer anyway.
I keep a list of where people have volunteered already. You can look at this preliminary list here. Most ACX Everywhere seasons there’s at least one active meetup group that fails to get on the big list, because everyone thought someone else was going to volunteer to run it. The funniest example of this is Berkeley California, unofficial rationalist capital of the world, which went three years without anyone from California volunteering to run ACX Everywhere there and thus requiring a Bostonian to step in and run their meetup for them. Seattle on the other hand routinely has three to five volunteers and is in no danger of failing to have a meetup. If you are reading this, and your group is not on that preliminary list yet, then you have an opportunity to beat Berkeley at the coveted “don’t fall prey to the bystander effect” metric.
Usually what happens when multiple people volunteer from the same city is I put them in touch with each other, give them both the details of the meetups they proposed, make a light recommendation, and then let them decide and get back to me.
Q. Is that all?
A. Pretty much!
Some of you may be disappointed that’s all.
I said above that the ACX Everywhere meetups are intended to be just social hangouts. They shouldn’t have an agenda, and there’s not any concrete output we expect other than a good time. Maybe you like agendas and memo writing, and perhaps you even wish you could argue about politics more than is typically encouraged for an ACX Everywhere. The EA University meetups weren’t enough, and neither are the ACX Everywhere Meetups. You’re still hungry for more. You must construct additional ~~pylons~~ meetups.
If so, this is your lucky year, because we’re also doing ACX Ballots Everywhere.
Scott historically shares how he plans to vote in his local elections. Since 2024, he’s been interested in scaling up the voter guides for all the big US cities and states. Usually I stay fairly hands off for these, since 1. I hate politics with the passion of a thousand sun miracles, and 2. I historically operate on grants that require me not to endorse any political candidate while doing my ACX meetup work. It’s been argued that providing neutral infrastructure for other people to endorse candidates would be fine. I still loath politics.
However, nobody’s given me any grants this year, plus the fellow who ran my first rationalist meetup is moving away and I wanted to give them a present. I’m going to miss having you around Taymon. Thanks for the megameetup.
If you want to run a Ballots Everywhere meetup, fill out this form by October 4th.
And again, the plan is:
Fill out the form by October 4th
The meetups get posted around October 5th
The meetups take place sometime between October 8th and October 19th
The guides get posted around October 24th
The Ballots Everywhere meetups do have an agenda and a specific deliverable. You need to figure out what races you’re discussing, discuss the options, come to some kind of conclusion, and write up your endorsements to share with Scott. Any group in the USA is welcome. If you’re not in the USA, but you’re still a democracy with elections around the right time, feel free to fill out the form but I don’t have a plan for doing anything different for you than I’m doing for the US meetups.
If it helps, you’re welcome to use Boston’s recent procedure to help run the meetup. It’s been Rigorously Tested, and by that I mean we used it in the current form exactly twice, it basically worked, we tried two very different versions before this year and this went better. Or you can come up with your own way to run the meetup. If it helps, take a look at the output from the last time we did these.
I will say that Boston got surprisingly positive feedback, both from the attendees and from the politicians. For attendance count, we got on the upper end of what I’d expect for a weekend afternoon meetup. For the politician side, a local campaign says people have been mentioning the endorsement. I don’t know how much good will come of this, but if you’ve been staring at politics lately wishing there was a bit more you could do, well, here’s something a bit more.
Plus you get to research and argue about politics for a couple hours. I know ACX meetup attendees. Some of you are grinning at that prospect.
These are going to run more or less like the ACX Everywhere meetups, except that 1. I can’t reimburse your supplies, and 2. you probably want a location where people can comfortably use laptops. Again, if you want to copy the Boston procedures, go ahead, but you can also do your own thing. Indulge!
Speaking of indulgence, what’s that you say? You want more meetups?
Insatiable. I love it.
On September 26th, 1983, near the height of the cold war, Stanislav Petrov was an lieutenant colonel for the USSR, stationed at a nuclear early-warning system. He was the duty officer when the system reported a US missile launch. The Soviet Union’s policy at the time was to launch missiles back if they received a warning. Petrov claimed, without being sure, that the warning was a glitch in the system and not a real inbound missile. He turned out to be right.
The story of Petrov is part of the Sequences, and there’s a tradition in the rationalist community to celebrate a man who averted a nuclear exchange and catastrophic loss of human life. It’s one of the easier rationalist rituals to perform, requiring only a few printed pamphlets, a small pad of index cards and pencils, and some candles.
Petrov day is in a ~~little under a week~~ day or two. If you’d like to run or participate, I suggest making plans and announcing it soon, perhaps today. You don’t need to route through ACX for these, just go for it. If you want advice, feel free to ask in the comments.
In summary:
EA University meetups are underway, and you can see the list of
those meetups here.If you want to run an ACX Everywhere meetup,
please fill outthis formby October 9th.If you want to run a Ballots Everywhere meetup,
please fill outthis other formby October 4th.If you want to run a Petrov Day ceremony, you can just do things.
**It is traditionally celebrated on September 26th, so you should make plans and announce it soon.**There’sa guide here. You may want to announce it over onLessWrong, or wherever local rationalist events are announced for your city.Have you considered that AI Pause Protests are kind of like a meetup if you squi-
I am forcibly dragged away from the post editor.
