A meetup in Southern California will occur on Sunday December 19, 2010. The meetup will start around 3:30PM and run for at least 2 hours and possibly 4 or 5. Anna Salamon and Yvain are very likely to be in attendance, as well as people from the last few meetups who may have projects to talk about, if are people are interested. Bring guests if you like. The location of the meetup will be...
...at the IHOP across from John Wayne Airport, about a mile from UC Irvine.
For those interested in carpooling: (1) driver needed in Santa Barbara (please comment if you can make it!), (2) driver available in San Diego, (3) driver available in Lake Forest, (4) driver available in Torrance., (5) driver available in Huntington Beach.
The format for past meetups has varied based on the number of attendees and their interests, at various points we have either tried or considered: paranoid debating, small group "dinner party conversations", structured rationality exercises, large discussions with people sharing personal experiences with sleep and "nutraceutical" interventions for intelligence augmentation, and specialized subprojects to develop tools for quantitatively estimating the value of things like cryonics or existential risk interventions.
Apologies for the short notice. I was trying to call and email around to see what people's winter holiday schedules were like and wasn't sure if this would come together. Based on one-on-one conversations I think we'll have pretty good turnout and interesting stuff to talk about!
This comment is intended as a parent post for talking about possible locations. For reference:
We have met at Westwood Brewing Company a few block south of UCLA.
We have met at Platt Campus Center on campus at Harvey Mudd.
We have met at an IHOP about a mile from UC Irvine.
I think the center of mass of people who are likely to attend (excluding people from San Diego) is somewhere around Anaheim.
Suggests and comments from people who know the los angeles metropolitan region better than I do (or whose attendance is conditional on the location being closer than X to them, for a small value of X) are appreciated!
If there's no better basis for choosing than the most convenience for the most people, my vote is for the IHOP near UCI, which is super-convenient for me. If it's there, I could come; if not, I'd very likely have to miss it.