Why to grow the New York rationalist group
A post to the New York LessWrong/Overcoming Bias mailing list, where Alyssa had recently moved to host the group. Internal community business: she lays out arguments for actively recruiting new members, addresses standard objections, and offers her new midtown apartment as event space.
Below are arguments for growing the group, and my responses to relevant objections. Of course, growing the group requires work, too. But before the work can be done, someone has to decide that it should be done, darn it.
Arguments
A group that doesn't grow is ultimately doomed. People will, eventually, get run over by a bus, or move away from the city, or lose interest, or some other such disaster. Of course, we can and should try to reduce the frequency with which these things happen, but we can't reduce it to zero. At best, we could reduce it to a level where we probably don't have to worry about the group going extinct before the Singularity… but that requires much greater foresight and amounts of effort than (I believe) anyone is likely to apply to the problem.
More cool people means more of everything. It means more people holding their own meetups, more people throwing parties, more people teaching each other cool stuff, more people starting companies, and more people available to be hired by those companies. There are usually diminishing marginal returns, and overhead costs associated with size… but all else equal, I think more of good things is good. In particular, at least a quarter of my entire life utility to date is the result of chance meetings at parties, meetups or other events. You meet a single new person, and that enables you to meet their friends, and their friends' friends, and so on.
Growth means we can diversify more. The weekly Tuesday meetups have certain established characteristics, and they're good for some people and not for others. If there were ten different weekly meetups, we'd be able to attract people with different skills and temperaments, not just more people with better versions of the same skills. Division of labor is positive-sum.
Existential risk reduction — the larger the number of people who care about it in a reasonably effective way, the less likely we are to all die. Of course, we don't normally discuss this much amongst ourselves, but introducing people to the group will (eventually) probably also introduce them to that part of the memeverse.
Responses to objections
Growing the group indiscriminately would result in lots of not very interesting people showing up, causing the interesting people to become diluted, and ultimately making the group bad.
This is a legitimate concern, of course, but there's some degree of protection from most uninteresting people just not bothering to show up to things. There are lots of obvious additional measures we could take if necessary, like restarting the list as Will did a few years ago, or selective marketing, or having some invitation-only meetups.
If the group gets too large, it will ultimately fragment — we won't all know each other, and we won't all be able to fit in the same spaces.
This will definitely happen, eventually, but I consider it a good thing. (See argument #3 above.) In any case, it's inevitable if we want to save the world, make billions, or do anything else on a large scale.
If we grow too much, there won't be enough good space to hold meetups in.
I think this problem will solve itself as the group grows and finds more people with space, and also becomes wealthier. If I remember correctly, a year or two ago we actually had three weekly meetups, and we managed to find space for those. For the immediate future, we have at least three reasonably sized private spaces that hold events with reasonable frequency (mine, Zvi's and Leverage).
Since I have a new apartment, I'd like to volunteer it as possible meetup or other event space. It's in midtown Manhattan, and can hold about fifteen (seated in chairs), thirty (comfortably standing) or forty-five (uncomfortably packed). If anyone has ideas, please do email me at alyssamvance@gmail.com. Since time is limited, resources are limited, etc., ideas must not involve me doing more work than the person who came up with them. Forward!