Praise: The focus on actually doing a thing is great.
Criticism: Most of this post was about methods the house will have, why these are OK, etc. Comparatively little was about what the house is going to used to accomplish outside itself. This seems worth putting much more up-front thought into given how much of the point is to make a house that can actually do a thing. Probably your methods and selection criteria are not very well-calibrated for whatever project will turn out to be best—human coordination is much easier when you’re coordinating about something in particular.
Obviously you will not know everything perfectly in advance no matter how much planning you do—but planning to accomplish a particular thing is very qualitatively different from planning to accomplish things in general.
Praise: A lot of the details on how to live together well (group exercise, food, time explicitly set aside for checking in) seem really good. If step 1 is just “learn to live well together,” that is itself a respectable project, and one most of the Rationalists have failed at. Probably most attempts at this fail, we only observe the old communes that didn’t fall apart.
I like both your praise and your criticism. re: the criticism, one of the reasons I’ve held off a bit is a suspicion that I can’t actually well-model the sorts of things the house will accomplish once fully formed (that it will be stranger/more surprising than I think). I had some thoughts, like running a talk series at prestigious universities, publishing a book or a movie, creating an org to teach rationality to middle- or high-schoolers and then doing it, building a robot car, trying to develop Veritaserum, etc. but they were all over the map.
I can’t actually well-model the sorts of things the house will accomplish once fully formed
My best guess is that having a highly specific plan that includes steering/replanning capacity and then totally abandoning it when the wheels hit the road because it turns out to be the wrong thing is way better than having a generic plan.
I had some thoughts, like running a talk series at prestigious universities, publishing a book or a movie, creating an org to teach rationality to middle- or high-schoolers and then doing it, building a robot car, trying to develop Veritaserum
I’d love to see how you’d design a house specifically for any one of these goals. Robot car is the one that I think would give you the most feedback from your internal models during the planning stage, followed by publishing a book or movie. “Create an org” is a bit recursive, and a talk series is probably either too easy or too vague. Not sure what you mean by develop Veritaserum but it seems to strongly overlap with some of Leverage’s most plausibly successful research.
I claim with moderate confidence that simply walking through how the house as currently planned might go about building a robot car would substantially improve not just your plans for particular object-level capacity, but general capacity. “How will this organization change its mind?” might be a lot harder to cash out usefully than “How will this organization change its mind about valve design for the fuel injector?”.
re: your best guess, that makes sense. It’s possible I should just choose one of those plans above (many of which actually have lots of fairly detailed planning behind them already) and run with it for now.
Eli Tyre strongly agrees with your last paragraph, and is (correctly, and appreciated-ly) pushing for the first large-scale project to be determined sooner rather than later.
Thing that sticks out to me: you mentioned the value of doing something as a house as opposed to as a company. Some of these seem like the sorts of things one does at-a-company-in-particular (and seem like they’re require the amount of time commitment that a job requires). Is there something that distinguishes doing this as a house vs doing this as a particularly intensive company?
Note that those are deliberately not in the charter itself, because I doubt they’re sufficient.
Two things distinguish it—one, starting a company is harder than starting a house, and two, a major part of this is to bind people in a society, and everyone around me already seems to have separate buckets for “my job” and “my life.” I think it’s important to start leveling up people and getting people moving in the “my life” bucket, and that the “my job” bucket already has plenty of forward momentum and pressure.
Praise: The focus on actually doing a thing is great.
Criticism: Most of this post was about methods the house will have, why these are OK, etc. Comparatively little was about what the house is going to used to accomplish outside itself. This seems worth putting much more up-front thought into given how much of the point is to make a house that can actually do a thing. Probably your methods and selection criteria are not very well-calibrated for whatever project will turn out to be best—human coordination is much easier when you’re coordinating about something in particular.
Obviously you will not know everything perfectly in advance no matter how much planning you do—but planning to accomplish a particular thing is very qualitatively different from planning to accomplish things in general.
Praise: A lot of the details on how to live together well (group exercise, food, time explicitly set aside for checking in) seem really good. If step 1 is just “learn to live well together,” that is itself a respectable project, and one most of the Rationalists have failed at. Probably most attempts at this fail, we only observe the old communes that didn’t fall apart.
I like both your praise and your criticism. re: the criticism, one of the reasons I’ve held off a bit is a suspicion that I can’t actually well-model the sorts of things the house will accomplish once fully formed (that it will be stranger/more surprising than I think). I had some thoughts, like running a talk series at prestigious universities, publishing a book or a movie, creating an org to teach rationality to middle- or high-schoolers and then doing it, building a robot car, trying to develop Veritaserum, etc. but they were all over the map.
My best guess is that having a highly specific plan that includes steering/replanning capacity and then totally abandoning it when the wheels hit the road because it turns out to be the wrong thing is way better than having a generic plan.
I’d love to see how you’d design a house specifically for any one of these goals. Robot car is the one that I think would give you the most feedback from your internal models during the planning stage, followed by publishing a book or movie. “Create an org” is a bit recursive, and a talk series is probably either too easy or too vague. Not sure what you mean by develop Veritaserum but it seems to strongly overlap with some of Leverage’s most plausibly successful research.
I claim with moderate confidence that simply walking through how the house as currently planned might go about building a robot car would substantially improve not just your plans for particular object-level capacity, but general capacity. “How will this organization change its mind?” might be a lot harder to cash out usefully than “How will this organization change its mind about valve design for the fuel injector?”.
re: your best guess, that makes sense. It’s possible I should just choose one of those plans above (many of which actually have lots of fairly detailed planning behind them already) and run with it for now.
Eli Tyre strongly agrees with your last paragraph, and is (correctly, and appreciated-ly) pushing for the first large-scale project to be determined sooner rather than later.
Hmm.
Thing that sticks out to me: you mentioned the value of doing something as a house as opposed to as a company. Some of these seem like the sorts of things one does at-a-company-in-particular (and seem like they’re require the amount of time commitment that a job requires). Is there something that distinguishes doing this as a house vs doing this as a particularly intensive company?
Note that those are deliberately not in the charter itself, because I doubt they’re sufficient.
Two things distinguish it—one, starting a company is harder than starting a house, and two, a major part of this is to bind people in a society, and everyone around me already seems to have separate buckets for “my job” and “my life.” I think it’s important to start leveling up people and getting people moving in the “my life” bucket, and that the “my job” bucket already has plenty of forward momentum and pressure.