Cambridge LW: Post-mortem

A brief post-mortem of this weeks LW meet-up.

Topic Selection

This week we had comparatively few people, so what worked this time may not generalise. At the beginning of the meet-up Douglas suggested we use one of his meetup formats. Of the three, skill focus was not usable without preparation, and we voted for small discussions above competitive estimating. After a second vote, we used Douglas’ suggested method to decide a topic, rather than our method from last week.

This involved each writing down a suggested topic, revealing them all, and then after a fixed timer expired standing behind our preferred one with not further discussion. Using this method, we eventually agreed unanimously on first organising a LessWrong Punt trip, about which an e-mail should be sent to Cambridge, East Anglia and London LessWrongians, followed by a discussion of rational office politics, specifically whether and how it is worthwhile to attempt to achieve goals through exerting influence on large organisations.

Pre commitments

Once again all pre-commitments were kept, apparently with considerable difficulty on Adam’s part. More pre-commitments were made this week, which will once again be posted here to slightly increase the social cost of breaking them.

• Ramana: Send out punting e-mail

• Ben: Post write-up of meeting and continue keeping diary

• Adam: Full note production on courses.