I think the problem here is the same as the problem of enforcing repayment of loans. If someone borrows a bunch of money, and then later has no money to repay, how should society respond?
Obviously, the thing is not simply “demand money.” Similarly, though, there can’t be no standard of requiring recompense, because that sets up a really bad incentive.
So my current plan is (in addition to really heavily highlighting that people need to think this through/talk with their advisors/visualize failure/ensure they have a buffer sufficient for likely amounts of damage) to set up something like the following norms:
If you conclusively determine that you need to drop from the experiment, no one is allowed to argue or convince; this is referred to as “rule-one-ing out,” and is a thing that we will explicitly practice in small doses in the hope that this will transfer over to larger spaces.
If dropped, you retain full access to kitchen, bathrooms, lawn, living room, etc. but agree to physically avoid house activities (and those house activities will e.g. change to not use shared rooms that you live in). You’re also welcome to leave, but maintain the same sort of “normal” financial obligation that people have when they suddenly vanish, i.e. you’re still paying for your slot for a little while.
“A little while” means that you agree to put forth good-faith effort to find a viable replacement. I said “three potential replacements” as an initial guess to point toward “it’s harder to replace yourself here than in normal houses; there should be some limit to your obligation if we say ‘no’ to your first two choices; you’re definitely not on the hook forever.” It’s possible that the answer should be “two” or something else.
In the event that this fails, something like “you’re on the hook, financially, for rent payments in the 2-6 week window from the time you drop,” which seems like a non-Draconian and fairly boilerplate norm (“this month, and next month too if ‘this month’ ends really soon”).
In the event that this fails, I was planning to just … secretly and quietly absorb the blow? This is made worse by your demand that it be explicit (some things are better as back pocket options), but whatever—few people will see this part. The idea is that OBVIOUSLY (unless you’re starting from the presumption that Duncan is evil) you have to make accommodations for a person who is (by the time they reach this step) both emotionally and financially exhausted/compromised, and part of the whole point of having a large community is that it creates flexibility to absorb blows like that (the damage is spread out enough that it becomes manageable on an individual level).
So at that point, yeah—people could just straight-up defect on the house, and the idea was NOT to blare that from the rooftops, because now there’s a clear incentive for defectors to just defect and impose costs on everyone else. That would’ve been better left as an obvious implicit norm that’s universal among decent people.
On a broader, whole-house level, we’re having open retrospectives every week, with opportunities for both nonymous and anonymous feedback and discussion. I put the odds of this going that far south in under six months at far less than 1%, but in the event that a majority of people decide the thing is bad, it’ll be at most six days before they have a chance to all say so, at the obvious Schelling point for coordination, at which point there’ll be a clearly decisive mass of consensus and I’ll just—be overruled. This is further made more likely to happen if-it-needs-to-happen by the fact that elsewhere in the thread I’ve committed to instituting a requirement that people check in weekly with outside advisors, and by the fact that there are multiple strong/iconoclastic/independent/healthily self-protective personalities in the mix who would have little to no fear in openly opposing me if they needed to, and by the fact that there’s a known second-in-command who’s a good coordinator in the event that things need to happen without me being looped in (noble coup).
I notice I am very confused as to why you keep reiterating actual talking points from actual known-dangerous cults in service of “providing evidence that you’re not a cult.”
For instance, most cults have a charismatic (“well known”) second-in-command who could take over should there be some scandal involving the initial leader. Most cults have written thousands of words about how they’re different from other cults. Most cults get very indignant when you accuse them of being cults.
On the object level: Why do you think people will be reassured by these statements, when they fail to differentiate you from exist cults?
Stepping up a level: how much have you read about cults and abusive group dynamics?
On the object level: because a plurality if not a majority of actual, real humans have indeed been reassured by them, including some who were open critics and said things like “I traveled 50% of the distance toward ‘this is a good idea’ [just from this post].” It’s worth noting that I’m not going to refrain from saying true things that cults have also said; reversed stupidity is not intelligence and the thrust of this post was never “differentiate myself from cults,” it was “here’s a thing I want to try.”
On the discourse level: still jumping to conclusions left and right. “When Duncan said well known, he must have meant charismatic, obviously.” False—Eli Tyre is many, many good things, but “charismatic” is not usually a compliment given to him. Furthermore, I note that you decided to ignore all of the other object-level content in favor of picking one nit (based on false assumptions), so I’m taking that as “you had nothing good to criticize in that other stuff, and so you decided not to say anything at all,” i.e. you’re unable to say “good point” and update incrementally.
Stepping up a level: since you’re inclined to view everything I say in the worst possible light and uncharitably leaping to conclusions, I claim that I’m justified in theorizing that literally no answer would’ve satisfied you (had I said 10 hours, you’d have been smugly dismissive of my lack of research; had I said 1000 you’d have said ‘well, you obviously weren’t paying attention’), and that it was a bullshit question to begin with.
We’re done; I anticipate that other skeptics in this thread (like decius and lumifer and deluks and taygetea, for example) will provide me with the overwhelming majority of the value you might offer, and at a fraction of the cost in you’re-doing-a-bunch-of-the-things-the-sequences-exist-to-warn-against.
Also, as far as “we’re done” goes: I agreed to rewrite my original post—not exactly a small time commitment, still working on it in fact. Are you seriously reneging on your original agreement to address it?
See, now you’re the one leaping to conclusions. I didn’t say that all of your talking points are actual talking points from actual cults. I am confused why even some of them are.
If you can point me to someone who felt “I wrote thousands of words” is, in and of itself, a solid argument for you being trustworthy, please link me to it. I need to do them an epistemic favor.
I was using “charismatic” in the sense of having enough of it to hold the group together. If he doesn’t have enough charisma to do that, then he’s kinda worthless as a commanding officer, neh?
Your claim is false. I wanted to know at what level to hold this conversation. I legitimately can’t tell if you’re waving a bunch of “this is a cult” red flags because you’re trying to be honest about the risks here, because you don’t realize they’re red flags, or because you’re playing N-Dimensional chess and these red flags are somehow all part of your plan.
Can you elaborate on the notion that you can be overruled? Your original post largely described a top-down Authoritarian model, with you being Supreme Ruler.
How would you handle it if someone identifies the environment as abusive, and therefor refuses to suggest anyone else join such an environment?
You discuss taking a financial hit, but I’ve previously objected that you have no visible stake in this. Do you have a dedicated savings account that can reasonably cover that hit? What if the environment is found abusive, and multiple people leave?
Anyone entering your group is signing a legal contract binding them to pay rent for six months. What legal commitments are you willing to make regarding exit protocols?
I notice that you are unusually unable to notice yourself jumping to conclusions. As a challenge, can you find the conclusions you’re still jumping to, above, without curiosity or caveat? Note the plural on “conclusions.”
An excellent question whose answer I’m interested in exposing to literally anyone other than you, the troll, and cousin_it. Also, a question that has been openly and actively discussed and is not yet fully finalized, but boils down to “pretty close to the obvious stuff about voting majorities.”
I am not and have not at any point required that “people should proselytize this, and encourage others to join.” So, I wouldn’t object or find it unreasonable if someone didn’t encourage others to join.
You’ve previously talked out of your butt without ever expressing curiosity as to my visible stake in this. So, repeat my answer to 1: a fine question, which everyone is encouraged to feel curiosity about, and which I’d be motivated and eager to discuss with the potential participants and everyone except you, the troll, and cousin_it.
Similarly, an excellent question that I don’t think is any of your business, though I continue to endorse the fact that I’ve voluntarily made it the good 97% of LessWrong’s business. And I know this is giving away part of the answer, but you just assumed that people would be signing lease agreements with me rather than with the owner of whatever house we rent (and therefore that I would have some fully controlling role in determining exit protocols, rather than simply being a coordinator and a negotiator).
I used the word visible to make it clear that there might be some stake which is not visible to me. If you have made your stakes visible in this thread, I’ll admit I missed it—can you please provide a link?
Furthermore, locking all of this into place in formal language was not a thing I was going to do by myself, but rather was going to be a collaborative, consensus-based process engaged in by the group as a whole, which is obvious if you look at all the other places in this thread and in the original post where I say that we’re going to discuss and iterate and figure things out together.
Or, for example, by the fact that I chose Dragon Army as the model, and not (as has come up elsewhere) Salamander Army.
I think the problem here is the same as the problem of enforcing repayment of loans. If someone borrows a bunch of money, and then later has no money to repay, how should society respond?
Obviously, the thing is not simply “demand money.” Similarly, though, there can’t be no standard of requiring recompense, because that sets up a really bad incentive.
So my current plan is (in addition to really heavily highlighting that people need to think this through/talk with their advisors/visualize failure/ensure they have a buffer sufficient for likely amounts of damage) to set up something like the following norms:
If you conclusively determine that you need to drop from the experiment, no one is allowed to argue or convince; this is referred to as “rule-one-ing out,” and is a thing that we will explicitly practice in small doses in the hope that this will transfer over to larger spaces.
If dropped, you retain full access to kitchen, bathrooms, lawn, living room, etc. but agree to physically avoid house activities (and those house activities will e.g. change to not use shared rooms that you live in). You’re also welcome to leave, but maintain the same sort of “normal” financial obligation that people have when they suddenly vanish, i.e. you’re still paying for your slot for a little while.
“A little while” means that you agree to put forth good-faith effort to find a viable replacement. I said “three potential replacements” as an initial guess to point toward “it’s harder to replace yourself here than in normal houses; there should be some limit to your obligation if we say ‘no’ to your first two choices; you’re definitely not on the hook forever.” It’s possible that the answer should be “two” or something else.
In the event that this fails, something like “you’re on the hook, financially, for rent payments in the 2-6 week window from the time you drop,” which seems like a non-Draconian and fairly boilerplate norm (“this month, and next month too if ‘this month’ ends really soon”).
In the event that this fails, I was planning to just … secretly and quietly absorb the blow? This is made worse by your demand that it be explicit (some things are better as back pocket options), but whatever—few people will see this part. The idea is that OBVIOUSLY (unless you’re starting from the presumption that Duncan is evil) you have to make accommodations for a person who is (by the time they reach this step) both emotionally and financially exhausted/compromised, and part of the whole point of having a large community is that it creates flexibility to absorb blows like that (the damage is spread out enough that it becomes manageable on an individual level).
So at that point, yeah—people could just straight-up defect on the house, and the idea was NOT to blare that from the rooftops, because now there’s a clear incentive for defectors to just defect and impose costs on everyone else. That would’ve been better left as an obvious implicit norm that’s universal among decent people.
On a broader, whole-house level, we’re having open retrospectives every week, with opportunities for both nonymous and anonymous feedback and discussion. I put the odds of this going that far south in under six months at far less than 1%, but in the event that a majority of people decide the thing is bad, it’ll be at most six days before they have a chance to all say so, at the obvious Schelling point for coordination, at which point there’ll be a clearly decisive mass of consensus and I’ll just—be overruled. This is further made more likely to happen if-it-needs-to-happen by the fact that elsewhere in the thread I’ve committed to instituting a requirement that people check in weekly with outside advisors, and by the fact that there are multiple strong/iconoclastic/independent/healthily self-protective personalities in the mix who would have little to no fear in openly opposing me if they needed to, and by the fact that there’s a known second-in-command who’s a good coordinator in the event that things need to happen without me being looped in (noble coup).
In short, the obvious stuff.
I notice I am very confused as to why you keep reiterating actual talking points from actual known-dangerous cults in service of “providing evidence that you’re not a cult.”
For instance, most cults have a charismatic (“well known”) second-in-command who could take over should there be some scandal involving the initial leader. Most cults have written thousands of words about how they’re different from other cults. Most cults get very indignant when you accuse them of being cults.
On the object level: Why do you think people will be reassured by these statements, when they fail to differentiate you from exist cults?
Stepping up a level: how much have you read about cults and abusive group dynamics?
On the object level: because a plurality if not a majority of actual, real humans have indeed been reassured by them, including some who were open critics and said things like “I traveled 50% of the distance toward ‘this is a good idea’ [just from this post].” It’s worth noting that I’m not going to refrain from saying true things that cults have also said; reversed stupidity is not intelligence and the thrust of this post was never “differentiate myself from cults,” it was “here’s a thing I want to try.”
On the discourse level: still jumping to conclusions left and right. “When Duncan said well known, he must have meant charismatic, obviously.” False—Eli Tyre is many, many good things, but “charismatic” is not usually a compliment given to him. Furthermore, I note that you decided to ignore all of the other object-level content in favor of picking one nit (based on false assumptions), so I’m taking that as “you had nothing good to criticize in that other stuff, and so you decided not to say anything at all,” i.e. you’re unable to say “good point” and update incrementally.
Stepping up a level: since you’re inclined to view everything I say in the worst possible light and uncharitably leaping to conclusions, I claim that I’m justified in theorizing that literally no answer would’ve satisfied you (had I said 10 hours, you’d have been smugly dismissive of my lack of research; had I said 1000 you’d have said ‘well, you obviously weren’t paying attention’), and that it was a bullshit question to begin with.
We’re done; I anticipate that other skeptics in this thread (like decius and lumifer and deluks and taygetea, for example) will provide me with the overwhelming majority of the value you might offer, and at a fraction of the cost in you’re-doing-a-bunch-of-the-things-the-sequences-exist-to-warn-against.
Also, as far as “we’re done” goes: I agreed to rewrite my original post—not exactly a small time commitment, still working on it in fact. Are you seriously reneging on your original agreement to address it?
See, now you’re the one leaping to conclusions. I didn’t say that all of your talking points are actual talking points from actual cults. I am confused why even some of them are.
If you can point me to someone who felt “I wrote thousands of words” is, in and of itself, a solid argument for you being trustworthy, please link me to it. I need to do them an epistemic favor.
I was using “charismatic” in the sense of having enough of it to hold the group together. If he doesn’t have enough charisma to do that, then he’s kinda worthless as a commanding officer, neh?
Your claim is false. I wanted to know at what level to hold this conversation. I legitimately can’t tell if you’re waving a bunch of “this is a cult” red flags because you’re trying to be honest about the risks here, because you don’t realize they’re red flags, or because you’re playing N-Dimensional chess and these red flags are somehow all part of your plan.
Can you elaborate on the notion that you can be overruled? Your original post largely described a top-down Authoritarian model, with you being Supreme Ruler.
How would you handle it if someone identifies the environment as abusive, and therefor refuses to suggest anyone else join such an environment?
You discuss taking a financial hit, but I’ve previously objected that you have no visible stake in this. Do you have a dedicated savings account that can reasonably cover that hit? What if the environment is found abusive, and multiple people leave?
Anyone entering your group is signing a legal contract binding them to pay rent for six months. What legal commitments are you willing to make regarding exit protocols?
I notice that you are unusually unable to notice yourself jumping to conclusions. As a challenge, can you find the conclusions you’re still jumping to, above, without curiosity or caveat? Note the plural on “conclusions.”
An excellent question whose answer I’m interested in exposing to literally anyone other than you, the troll, and cousin_it. Also, a question that has been openly and actively discussed and is not yet fully finalized, but boils down to “pretty close to the obvious stuff about voting majorities.”
I am not and have not at any point required that “people should proselytize this, and encourage others to join.” So, I wouldn’t object or find it unreasonable if someone didn’t encourage others to join.
You’ve previously talked out of your butt without ever expressing curiosity as to my visible stake in this. So, repeat my answer to 1: a fine question, which everyone is encouraged to feel curiosity about, and which I’d be motivated and eager to discuss with the potential participants and everyone except you, the troll, and cousin_it.
Similarly, an excellent question that I don’t think is any of your business, though I continue to endorse the fact that I’ve voluntarily made it the good 97% of LessWrong’s business. And I know this is giving away part of the answer, but you just assumed that people would be signing lease agreements with me rather than with the owner of whatever house we rent (and therefore that I would have some fully controlling role in determining exit protocols, rather than simply being a coordinator and a negotiator).
I used the word visible to make it clear that there might be some stake which is not visible to me. If you have made your stakes visible in this thread, I’ll admit I missed it—can you please provide a link?
Furthermore, locking all of this into place in formal language was not a thing I was going to do by myself, but rather was going to be a collaborative, consensus-based process engaged in by the group as a whole, which is obvious if you look at all the other places in this thread and in the original post where I say that we’re going to discuss and iterate and figure things out together.
Or, for example, by the fact that I chose Dragon Army as the model, and not (as has come up elsewhere) Salamander Army.