[Note: I’ve typed this comment without refreshing the page, and thus have not seen any of the other responses that may have cropped up in the past few hours, nor taken those responses into account in any way yet. I’m seeing only the original reply, here.]
Part 1 of ?
Repeating my thanks before heading into what will be a mix of concession and disagreement—I have qualms about the way you engaged with this post, but am grateful for the fact that you did engage, at all, rather than just staying quiet, and I want to support the core of that even as I complain about certain aspects of your chosen method.
I think your first paragraph had one clear point: “I, as a smart, perceptive person who sees things others often fail to see, found a lot of this viscerally upsetting, which is probably a sign that there are actual problems.” I liked that you added this point, and I think it would’ve been stronger if you hadn’t been so deliberately assholish with the rest of it. I’m going to take the core point seriously as I read further, and see if I can get a clear sense of what it is you see that I don’t.
The comment about Ender’s Game (paragraph 2) is a misunderstanding on your part, either deliberate or easy to clear up—there’s no wargaming in the plan, there’s no battle room, there are no other groups of people playacting as other armies. The aesthetic of Dragon Army was, in short: everyone is expected to keep their eyes open and act independently to do what seems right and sane in the moment. Groups should practice coordinating together to build trust and be capable of action-requiring-more-than-one-individual, but the assumption is that an army run by forty minds will trump an army run by one.
In paragraph 3, you make a valid point about the efficacy and usefulness of CFAR, which is indeed worth questioning, and the side you’re holding down is not obviously wrong. It’s a bit overwrought, given that the phrase “insistence on the validity of his experience as a CFAR instructor” is a clear strawman; I was almost as emphatic about the fact that I’ve written nerdy fanfic, so I think you were just looking for an opportunity to climb up on a soapbox? That being said, your point about interpersonal romance being a relevant and important factor matches my own intuition, and I wish you had appreciated the fact that I wanted to continue thinking carefully about correct solutions rather than just spam the first ideas that popped into my head.
In paragraph four, you make an entirely unfounded leap that is beneath the quality of what’s expected from a poster on this forum. All of your “this suggests” are false handwaving, and I find the rest of your assertions generally laughable, given that there’s only one person in this thread so far who’s demonstrated deep antisocial behavior, and that you’re hurling these insults from a position of anonymity. However, I’m going to continue to take things one paragraph at a time rather than assuming that I’ve seen your entire position as soon as I’ve got a mockable straw model, so we’ll start fresh with your next point.
Hmmm. In the first sentence of paragraph 5, you and I seem to converge somewhat—we both agree that the Bay Area rationalist community is not living up to its promise, and has too few people doing good and impactful work. I’m glad to share this bit of world-model with you. I note that my idea for what to do about it—try a different sort of house/community—is just one possible strategy among many, and I’m curious if you have other concrete suggestions that you’d be willing to offer. I’m especially curious what you’re actually doing, as you seem to have a sort of … scathing dismissal? … of everyone else, and I’d expect from your tone that you must be engaged in at least one concretely high-promise project (else it all smacks of rank hypocrisy). Would you be willing to detail a) what you’re up to, or b) a few concrete proposals that you suspect are higher promise? At this point, it’d be hard to simply abandon the Dragon Army idea, but if a good enough alternative came along, I would take it. The point is not to be seen to be right, it’s to actually make an impact.
I notice that the rest of that paragraph is basically off-topic. Without contributing to the off-topicness, I want to say that I do, indeed, find at least a couple of worthwhile points of agreement within it, but I think most of it is wrong, in addition to being somewhat morally reprehensible re: vicious attacks, and that you’re overconfident in your assertions. If you’d like to shoot me a private message, I’d be happy to say where I agree and where I disagree.
Oh, interesting—paragraph six also begins with a claim I have a lot of sympathy for/agreement with. I don’t hold it as strongly as you do, but I do think there’s a lot of clear dysfunction and self-deception in the community, and I’d like to take steps to correct it. I don’t know how to evaluate your claim that the best people are on the periphery (as I’m a weird mix of professionally central and socially somewhat distant), but again—if you’d like to make concrete recommendations about who I should talk to, or direct some of the people you hold in high esteem to comment on this thread, I suspect you’re right about there being a lot of untapped value. I do note that Dragon Army is not actually pulling from the central or highest status people, but thus far looks to be made up of a lot of solid, normal, representative rationalists, so I think your claim about trying to delude people is straightforwardly false, as is your assumption that I don’t see or don’t want to see any warts and flaws. (I believe there are lots of people who will back me up on this, including some who will claim that I’ve been too hostile or critical. That’s partially why I sympathize with the strength of your negativity.)
Ah, paragraph seven contains the unword “cult,” which I think you’re using to say something, but I’d rather you just actually said the thing, instead of applying the empty, stretched, multi-interpretation label. Like, I think if you laid out specific, concrete objections, I and others could benefit from them, but just saying cult is lazy name-calling.
I do somewhat agree with your objections to the list of specific skills attained after a year. I had hoped that the large word DRAFT at the top, plus the repeated statements that the whole plan was to iterate, and that I didn’t expect to be able to figure out the right stuff on the first try, would’ve clued you in to the fact that I, too, am aware that the list is inadequate. Do you have specific suggestions for replacements? Keep in mind, the hard problem is to balance things-that-will-be-generally-useful-for-a-medium-sized-group-of-people against the fact that everyone involved has their own specific career and expertise already. Part of the impetus here is social, part of it is becoming well-rounded, part of it is practicing the skill of gaining/improving skills, and all of that is trying to avoid skating into trivial irrelevancy. Got any ideas?
As a meta note, I think that people who cower behind anonymity don’t deserve to make concrete claims about their skill sets without backing them up, so until further notice and on a policy level, I’m treating your claim that you meet 11 out of 14 criteria as a flat-out lie (despite its plausibility overall). You’re currently nothing and nobody and have no skills; that will change as soon as you a) reveal yourself or b) demonstrate credibility under this pseudonym.
Your next attempt to strawman things takes a sub-point out of context and deliberately ignores the actual requirement being made, which was that people hold their beliefs and models with skepticism/realize that their internal experience does not represent absolute truth, and that they treat one another with a behaviorist’s lens, using revealed preferences and past behavior as predictors, rather than relying on mental summations that may be false or straw. I’m curious whether, setting aside your mockery of a subpoint, you agree with that point.
Interestingly enough, I have reasonable credence in your two inferences. In my experience, members of this community do attempt to install norms to compensate for social failings (and do have a somewhat higher-than-average level of social ineptitude). And also, I think many people in this community are low-empathy and embody the bad side of individualism. However, unlike you, I see that a lot of people are trying damn hard to correct this, and I’m curious whether you think they should be written off for not being good enough already, or whether you have specific suggestions that differ from the ones already being tried. I note that a big part of what Dragon Army intends to do is just try a whole bunch of stuff (including stuff already known to work; there’s no premium on novelty), and that I think data will be better than armchair ranting.
I suspect you haven’t done much in the way of looking in the mirror when you type the words “repressed irritation, interpersonal drama, and general unpleasantness.” Certainly you don’t meet any of my standards for “how a decent person behaves.” I’m going to try to avoid the fundamental attribution error here, though, and assume that we’ve hit some combination of a) a bad day, b) the problems of online communication, and c) you being unusually triggered or having run out of some important resources.
I’m not going to engage with the ad hominem attack at the end, which, in addition to being wrong as a tactic, also fails in specific. I think that if you compare yourself, who is suggesting suicide as a solution, with OSC, who is definitely wrong about a lot of things but has never gone so far as to claim a fellow human would be better off killing themselves, you’ll note that you might be on the wrong side. I’d check my cap for a skull, at least in the context of today’s mood.
For anyone else—I welcome calm, reasoned elaboration on any of the on-topic points this person made. When I went through blow-by-blow, there were fewer than I’d hoped, but there are true and valuable and important criticisms here, and I’m glad they’ve been added to the mix, and I wouldn’t mind further discussion of them.
I liked that you added this point, and I think it would’ve been stronger if you hadn’t been so deliberately assholish with the rest of it.
Sure, but it’s fun to be an asshole. I love knocking people down a peg. Especially in public.
The comment about Ender’s Game (paragraph 2) is a misunderstanding on your part, either deliberate or easy to clear up
Asserting that this isn’t elaborate playacting is not very convincing in light of the fact that your first two proposed group norms are (1) a greeting salute and (2) a call-and-response mechanism. I played the beginning of Final Fantasy XIII two nights ago and thought that was the most cringeworthy stuff I’ve seen in months, but you managed to top even that.
I wish you had appreciated the fact that I wanted to continue thinking carefully about correct solutions rather than just spam the first ideas that popped into my head.
The more important thing here is that you imagine this as a problem that can be solved when in fact if the problem did arise, that would itself preclude it from being easily solved. The “solution” is to not select immature people who you can reasonably expect to get into interpersonal drama, which precludes the vast majority of the rationalist community, which is part of the point of my comment.
if you’d like to make concrete recommendations about who I should talk to
I can suggest that you talk to Satvik Beri, and maybe direct him to my comment as well, although I feel slightly bad for potentially causing him to spend time on this.
Ah, paragraph seven contains the unword “cult,” which I think you’re using to say something, but I’d rather you just actually said the thing, instead of applying the empty, stretched, multi-interpretation label.
I mean that the Berkeley rationalist community is a cult in the full and unqualified sense of the word “cult”. You, as a high priest, naturally disagree.
Your next attempt to strawman things takes a sub-point out of context and deliberately ignores the actual requirement being made, which was that people hold their beliefs and models with skepticism/realize that their internal experience does not represent absolute truth, and that they treat one another with a behaviorist’s lens, using revealed preferences and past behavior as predictors, rather than relying on mental summations that may be false or straw.
This is a good thing practically by construction.
My point is that this is almost completely unnecessary in a world where people begin by defaulting to behavior that is very unlikely to bother others. I am also gesturing at the following:
The rationalist community does not default to such behavior, which is an indication of the conjunction of near-autistic social skills and remarkably low empathy, and
The rationalist community does not default to such behavior, but instead of anyone pointing out that this is a reasonable thing to default to (c.f. Japanese society), people try to patch it up with legalism, bureaucracy, and a laundry list of rules, which in my experience makes it feel like I’m talking to the low-IQ HR department of a large multinational conglomerate.
The fact that the Berkeley rationalist community seems particularly bad at this is a major red flag in almost every conceivable fashion.
However, unlike you, I see that a lot of people are trying damn hard to correct this, and I’m curious whether you think they should be written off for not being good enough already
I think they should be thrown off a bridge, either metaphorically or literally. I find it detestable to have them near me at all.
I suspect you haven’t done much in the way of looking in the mirror when you type the words “repressed irritation, interpersonal drama, and general unpleasantness.” Certainly you don’t meet any of my standards for “how a decent person behaves.” I’m going to try to avoid the fundamental attribution error here, though, and assume that we’ve hit some combination of a) a bad day, b) the problems of online communication, and c) you being unusually triggered or having run out of some important resources.
Two questions:
Does it look to you like my irritation is “repressed”?
I’m completely anonymous. Exactly what interpersonal drama am I causing here?
I agree that I can be, when I want to be, a very unpleasant person.
I don’t think you actually succeeded in knocking anyone down a peg, though. I’d bet ~$50 that a neutral, outside observer (say, from a different English speaking country) would say that a) you come off far worse than anyone else in the thread and b) they didn’t find your post convincing.
I think our disagreement over the distinction between playacting and not boils down to something like, I believe that the very small nuts-and-bolts of social interaction (jargon, in-jokes, simple trigger-action responses like sneeze “bless you”) are more important than most people give them credit for. In other words, I think the silly theater ends up actually mattering? Or, to be more specific—I think most of it doesn’t matter, but some small bits of it end up being really important, and so it’s an arena I want to do explicit experimentation with. I want to see whether the small salute actually ends up being relevant to bonding and sense-of-purpose, and no, I don’t have a double blind or anything like that, but I will be asking a bunch of fairly introspective people for their thoughts afterward.
I suspect, from your reaction, that you’d basically assert that this premise is false, and that the … skin? … of social interaction is meaningless, at least compared to the actual connections and information conveyed. This seems like a sensible, plausible position to take, but I think your mockery of the alternative hypothesis is unfounded.
I agree that if romance/sex/etc pop up, that would preclude the problem from being easily solved, but where did you get the impression that I was afraid of attempting to solve hard problems? There’s definitely a filter to screen out immature or uncontrolled people; while you yourself might make it through, the persona you’re currently expressing would’ve been rejected by the second paragraph of your original response. We’ve already turned away people for a variety of reasons, and at least one because of exactly this axis.
I appreciate the recommendation that I run things by Satvik. He’s a perceptive thinker and I haven’t run this by him yet. I wish that you’d responded in specific to more of my requests to draw out your suggestions—you’re continuing to clarify your models of the problems, but not offering much in the way of replacements for the things I’m planning to try.
You’re still not saying what you actually mean by the word “cult.” There’s a decent chance I’d agree with you—I’ve described the Bay Area rationalist community as a cult myself, even recently, when talking to friends and family members. But I was careful to disambiguate exactly what I meant by that, and I can’t help but note that your continued refusal to spell it out makes me suspect that you don’t actually have a coherent thing to say, and are just trying to score easy points.
I agree again with 1 (low empathy, etc.) though I think the strength of the effect is smaller than you seem to think it is. I think that you’re still not believing me when I say I agree with 2? Note that I’m calling you out for unacceptable rudeness in this thread, for instance. I also suspect you have a huge typical mind thing going on, and vastly underestimate how easy it is for people to rub each other wrong while acting in complete good faith in a normal society—the bed example was maybe poorly chosen, but I disagree with you that it’s easy to “default to behavior that is very unlikely to bother others.” I’ve been in a wide range of social milieu, and it’s much less about the actual behavior and much more about people’s cough willingness to pick nits and start fights.
I think that you’ve lost all moral authority by doubling down on your “people should die for this” claim, and because of that, I think this’ll be my last attempt to engage with you as an equal (you’re not my equal; at least this facet of your personality is my clear inferior). I will, however, continue to read if you make those concrete suggestions I’m hoping you have somewhere.
In answer to your last two questions: yes, it looks like your irritation is repressed. Not here, because my main hypothesis is that here is where you finally felt safe to vent a ton of irritation that you’ve been repressing in other arenas, for long amounts of time. Just look back at your first post—maybe a quarter of it was in response to me, and the rest is long-simmering, long-festering frustration about a bunch of other things (some of them valid and some of them not). Textbook repress-then-explode. And 2, your claim that posting anonymously equates to not causing interpersonal drama is again so laughable that unless it’s a deliberate joke, you’re revealing this persona to be less socially aware than literally the most awkward and inept rationalist I’ve ever met.
You’re not unpleasant so much as just … not showing yourself to be worth the time. I really hoped I could get more out of you, because I actually know, on a deep level, that I don’t have all the answers and the opposition is the first best place to look. But in terms of useful-criticism-per-word, you’ve been outdone by every other person who’s registered reservation or disagreement here.
I don’t know if I’m neutral (no, because I have an account here for a while now), but I wouldn’t have the same confidence to swing that bet out of there like you do. The post in and of itself is not convincing enough for me to say that your idea won’t work, but it certainly makes me go “hmm, well, he might have a point there”.
Specifically:
“Normal” people don’t need to explicitly write out all the rules for their housing with regards to social rules.
But here there’s a large list of rules and activitities and all that with the goal of getting group housing to work properly.
Also, here’s some examples of the group of people that you want to source your participants from having low social skills.
By the way, if you set up a ton of rules then it usually won’t work.
Thus, there’s a pretty big chance that the rules will not work out and that the social skills of the participants will be too low to have the group housing work.
I am not convinced that this is the truth.
However, if I read in a year from now that this is what happened, I would not be surprised.
Basically what I’m saying is I can see 1 or 2 people leaving due to drama despite the rules if you try this, with a chance greater than, I dunno, 10%?
You’re looking at content, not status (as implied by ‘knocking someone down a peg’). My immediate reaction to the top-level comment was: “well, they have some good points, but damn are they embarassing themselves with this language”. Possibly shaped by me being generally sceptical about the ideas in the OP.
As far as the bet is about the form of the post, rather than the content, I think Duncan’s pretty safe.
“Normal” people don’t need to explicitly write out all the rules for their housing with regards to social rules.
I have seen normies having endless fights about trivial things, such as “who should buy toilet paper”, that a simple explicit norm could solve. (For example “people keep buying the paper in turns, when you buy one check this box to keep everyone informed” or “Joe buys the paper, everyone else gives Joe $2 each month” or whatever.)
The best case, of course, would be trying to be nice by default, and solve explicitly the situations where the default behavior fails. But that seems like what would quite likely happen in the Dragon Army anyway… or maybe I am just applying the typical mind fallacy here.
I do somewhat agree with your objections to the list of specific skills attained after a year. I had hoped that the large word DRAFT at the top, plus the repeated statements that the whole plan was to iterate, and that I didn’t expect to be able to figure out the right stuff on the first try, would’ve clued you in to the fact that I, too, am aware that the list is inadequate. Do you have specific suggestions for replacements? Keep in mind, the hard problem is to balance things-that-will-be-generally-useful-for-a-medium-sized-group-of-people against the fact that everyone involved has their own specific career and expertise already. Part of the impetus here is social, part of it is becoming well-rounded, part of it is practicing the skill of gaining/improving skills, and all of that is trying to avoid skating into trivial irrelevancy. Got any ideas?
I’m not the originator of this thread, but that part did resonate with me. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with those skills, but the combination of choice of skills and the desired level of competency does seem to be decidedly mediocre given the effort and people involved.
1) Above-average physical capacity
What is average? In the US, you could probably be somewhat overweight with no strength, speed, endurance, or agility to speak of and still be “above average.”
(2) Above-average introspection
I would expect almost all of the people who volunteer to be part of a rationalist group house to be there or pretty close to there already.
I think my previous comment applies here as well. Perhaps you have a different conception of “average” than I do, but I think if you’re going to establish a long-term mini-dictatorship of a group house, you should be aiming for quite a bit higher than “above average.”
(6) Above-average scientific lab skill/ability to theorize and rigorously investigate claims
I don’t really understand this one. Is your group house actually going to have the ability to practice conducting laboratory experiments? That’s a very high overhead endeavor.
(7) Average problem-solving/debugging skill (8) Average public speaking skill (9) Average leadership/coordination skill (10) Average teaching and tutoring skill
Average? Your goals are to reach average, after a year of dedicated effort? Getting into the 80th percentile of anything numbered 1-10 on this list should require a minimum of effort on the part of dedicated individuals following strict rules, unless you have some specific medical condition interfering.
(11) Fundamentals of first aid & survival
How fundamental is fundamental? This also shouldn’t take very long if you are willing to put in the effort and practice a bit (2 weeks, at the outside, though you could the true basics in a long weekend). I don’t know how it’s related to the rest of the goals, though, or why it’s important enough to be on the rest of the list. Also, you should practice many of these skills in the actual wilderness, which means time away from everything else.
(12) Fundamentals of financial management
Again, I’m not sure what’s “fundamental.” You could spend 2 days on this, or the entire year.
(13) At least one of: fundamentals of programming, graphic design, writing, A/V/animation, or similar (employable mental skill) (14) At least one of: fundamentals of woodworking, electrical engineering, welding, plumbing, or similar (employable trade skill)
Do you have the ability to teach/practice trade skills at the house? I would expect leaning any of these things, to an employable level, within a year, would require spending time similar to a full-time job somewhere that has infrastructure, in addition to a significant investment of money (at least a few thousand dollars). (I checked some local welding and plumbing classes at community colleges, which is where I’m getting those numbers).
Someone who already has one of these skills (I’m guess you’ll have a few coders at least) is going to be at a tremendous advantage in terms of time and possibly money compared to someone who is not. 13 and 14 are going to each represent a greater time investment than the others combined, unless you already have them.
As a meta note, I think that people who cower behind anonymity don’t deserve to make concrete claims about their skill sets without backing them up, so until further notice and on a policy level, I’m treating your claim that you meet 11 out of 14 criteria as a flat-out lie (despite its plausibility overall). You’re currently nothing and nobody and have no skills; that will change as soon as you a) reveal yourself or b) demonstrate credibility under this pseudonym.
I don’t know if you care, but I would say I already meet a similar number of these criteria. The only one I definitely don’t meet is 14. I’m willing to tie this account to my real name and explain/prove why I meet them (though some of them would be quite difficult to really prove, I could only argue).
The problem seems to be to be the tradeoff between going deep and going wide, with the added complexity that going deep on the wrong thing seems strictly worse than going wide, and so we’re defaulting to going wide where there’s uncertainty.
Put another way, it’s unlikely that any of those specific skills are going to be particularly important to any of our longest-term goals, but it also seems counterproductive to just sit there thinking about which direction to go in. I’m usually not the biggest expert in the room, but I usually am the most generally competent in terms of being able to fill holes or solve whatever problem crops up, and it’s because I have a habit of just constantly churning and picking up new skills and methods and heuristics wherever I go. I suspect that others would benefit from a similar habit, in particular because once “the right skill” does come along, you have both the affordance to start learning it and a variety of experiences allowing you to learn quickly and efficiently.
That’s a claim. Not necessarily supported, but reasonable, I think, and worth trying out.
I note that I disagree that it’s easy to break averages in all of these things at once. People who don’t actually check their abilities against a standard tend to be wildly overconfident, and people tend to underestimate how long it will take them to learn X or accomplish Y; these things are solidly documented. And while competence does tend to cluster (e.g. “G”), so the picture’s not quite as bleak as the second half of this sentence, once you’ve got a dozen different domains and shooting to be above the 50% mark in all of them, you’re looking at a person who’s approximating one in four thousand, and when you try to get a whole group to hit that mark, the challenge is pretty real. I wouldn’t be surprised if most people have most of this easy, but I think you’re not fully grokking the difficulty of making everybody baseline competent in all of these domains. For instance, you note that many of these skills require only a few weeks, but I don’t know if you added up all of those weeks, compared them to the time commitment, and noted that they’re all being practiced off-hours and people have their own jobs and lives as well.
It’s a floor, though, not a ceiling—we’re aiming at “world class skill,” we’re just not naively expecting that getting there is going to be easy, and initial expectations are meant to be exceeded.
Various additional points …
The trade skill goal got scaled back in response to another comment; it was the hardest/sketchiest one to begin with.
We will have some ability to practice trade skills at the house, and are adopting a norm of going and seeking professional instruction outside from time to time.
I buy that you meet a large number of these criteria; I meet most of them myself. But the ones I don’t have are sticky/tricky.
. And while competence does tend to cluster (e.g. “G”), so the picture’s not quite as bleak as the second half of this sentence, once you’ve got a dozen different domains and shooting to be above the 50% mark in all of them, you’re looking at a person who’s approximating one in four thousand,
I don’t think these skills are anywhere near independent. It’s also not obvious that they’re normally distributed. And, being above the 50% mark in a dozen skills by coincidence being unlikely does not at all tell you how hard it is to gain skills if you put in some deliberate work.
I generally am sympathetic to the argument that stuff can be harder than one assumes, but I also am generally cynical about the “average” level of most of these skills. Most people probably don’t even know what “calibration” means precisely enough to test their own level of calibration. I’m not trying to be arrogant here, I pretty much have only heard about the idea of writing down your confidence level of a bunch of predictions and seeing what comes true from the rationalist community and rationalist-adjacent ones.
For the sake of avoiding this issue, and because rather than using terms like “above-average,” I would attempt to pin down ahead of time requirements that are as specific as possible to measure progress in each of the areas you care about.
For instance, you note that many of these skills require only a few weeks, but I don’t know if you added up all of those weeks, compared them to the time commitment, and noted that they’re all being practiced off-hours and people have their own jobs and lives as well.
I don’t think it should take a few weeks each to exceed average in most of these skills. I expect it to take a few weeks total (or 1 day a week for a few months).
I’m plausibly interested in betting a few hundred dollars against you, especially if (as seems likely, given your confidence) you were to bet $1000 against my $250 or something like that. If I imagine the hundred closest people I know uttering the above, I think all but one or two of them are wrong/overconfident.
What statement, specifically, would we be betting on? It’s certainly plausible that I’m underestimating the difficulty in getting an entire group to above these standards in comparison to getting one person. Though, I think the main issue may be a difference in what we perceive as average, rather than a model of how hard learning these skills is.
I spent five minutes trying to operationalize, but I couldn’t come up with anything that seemed workable. For now, we’ll just proceed knowing that at least one of us is wrong. =)
Either way is fine with me, but if you can express in any way what you think “average” is for some of these skills, I would like to know because now I’m really curious.
Thanks for taking so much time to keep responding to a fairly random commenter!
As a meta note, I think that people who cower behind anonymity don’t deserve to make concrete claims about their skill sets without backing them up, so until further notice and on a policy level, I’m treating your claim that you meet 11 out of 14 criteria as a flat-out lie (despite its plausibility overall).
The amount of criteria he hit’s likely depends on the definition of average. The reference class matters a great deal.
[Note: I’ve typed this comment without refreshing the page, and thus have not seen any of the other responses that may have cropped up in the past few hours, nor taken those responses into account in any way yet. I’m seeing only the original reply, here.]
Part 1 of ?
Repeating my thanks before heading into what will be a mix of concession and disagreement—I have qualms about the way you engaged with this post, but am grateful for the fact that you did engage, at all, rather than just staying quiet, and I want to support the core of that even as I complain about certain aspects of your chosen method.
I think your first paragraph had one clear point: “I, as a smart, perceptive person who sees things others often fail to see, found a lot of this viscerally upsetting, which is probably a sign that there are actual problems.” I liked that you added this point, and I think it would’ve been stronger if you hadn’t been so deliberately assholish with the rest of it. I’m going to take the core point seriously as I read further, and see if I can get a clear sense of what it is you see that I don’t.
The comment about Ender’s Game (paragraph 2) is a misunderstanding on your part, either deliberate or easy to clear up—there’s no wargaming in the plan, there’s no battle room, there are no other groups of people playacting as other armies. The aesthetic of Dragon Army was, in short: everyone is expected to keep their eyes open and act independently to do what seems right and sane in the moment. Groups should practice coordinating together to build trust and be capable of action-requiring-more-than-one-individual, but the assumption is that an army run by forty minds will trump an army run by one.
In paragraph 3, you make a valid point about the efficacy and usefulness of CFAR, which is indeed worth questioning, and the side you’re holding down is not obviously wrong. It’s a bit overwrought, given that the phrase “insistence on the validity of his experience as a CFAR instructor” is a clear strawman; I was almost as emphatic about the fact that I’ve written nerdy fanfic, so I think you were just looking for an opportunity to climb up on a soapbox? That being said, your point about interpersonal romance being a relevant and important factor matches my own intuition, and I wish you had appreciated the fact that I wanted to continue thinking carefully about correct solutions rather than just spam the first ideas that popped into my head.
In paragraph four, you make an entirely unfounded leap that is beneath the quality of what’s expected from a poster on this forum. All of your “this suggests” are false handwaving, and I find the rest of your assertions generally laughable, given that there’s only one person in this thread so far who’s demonstrated deep antisocial behavior, and that you’re hurling these insults from a position of anonymity. However, I’m going to continue to take things one paragraph at a time rather than assuming that I’ve seen your entire position as soon as I’ve got a mockable straw model, so we’ll start fresh with your next point.
Hmmm. In the first sentence of paragraph 5, you and I seem to converge somewhat—we both agree that the Bay Area rationalist community is not living up to its promise, and has too few people doing good and impactful work. I’m glad to share this bit of world-model with you. I note that my idea for what to do about it—try a different sort of house/community—is just one possible strategy among many, and I’m curious if you have other concrete suggestions that you’d be willing to offer. I’m especially curious what you’re actually doing, as you seem to have a sort of … scathing dismissal? … of everyone else, and I’d expect from your tone that you must be engaged in at least one concretely high-promise project (else it all smacks of rank hypocrisy). Would you be willing to detail a) what you’re up to, or b) a few concrete proposals that you suspect are higher promise? At this point, it’d be hard to simply abandon the Dragon Army idea, but if a good enough alternative came along, I would take it. The point is not to be seen to be right, it’s to actually make an impact.
I notice that the rest of that paragraph is basically off-topic. Without contributing to the off-topicness, I want to say that I do, indeed, find at least a couple of worthwhile points of agreement within it, but I think most of it is wrong, in addition to being somewhat morally reprehensible re: vicious attacks, and that you’re overconfident in your assertions. If you’d like to shoot me a private message, I’d be happy to say where I agree and where I disagree.
Oh, interesting—paragraph six also begins with a claim I have a lot of sympathy for/agreement with. I don’t hold it as strongly as you do, but I do think there’s a lot of clear dysfunction and self-deception in the community, and I’d like to take steps to correct it. I don’t know how to evaluate your claim that the best people are on the periphery (as I’m a weird mix of professionally central and socially somewhat distant), but again—if you’d like to make concrete recommendations about who I should talk to, or direct some of the people you hold in high esteem to comment on this thread, I suspect you’re right about there being a lot of untapped value. I do note that Dragon Army is not actually pulling from the central or highest status people, but thus far looks to be made up of a lot of solid, normal, representative rationalists, so I think your claim about trying to delude people is straightforwardly false, as is your assumption that I don’t see or don’t want to see any warts and flaws. (I believe there are lots of people who will back me up on this, including some who will claim that I’ve been too hostile or critical. That’s partially why I sympathize with the strength of your negativity.)
Part 2 of 2
Ah, paragraph seven contains the unword “cult,” which I think you’re using to say something, but I’d rather you just actually said the thing, instead of applying the empty, stretched, multi-interpretation label. Like, I think if you laid out specific, concrete objections, I and others could benefit from them, but just saying cult is lazy name-calling.
I do somewhat agree with your objections to the list of specific skills attained after a year. I had hoped that the large word DRAFT at the top, plus the repeated statements that the whole plan was to iterate, and that I didn’t expect to be able to figure out the right stuff on the first try, would’ve clued you in to the fact that I, too, am aware that the list is inadequate. Do you have specific suggestions for replacements? Keep in mind, the hard problem is to balance things-that-will-be-generally-useful-for-a-medium-sized-group-of-people against the fact that everyone involved has their own specific career and expertise already. Part of the impetus here is social, part of it is becoming well-rounded, part of it is practicing the skill of gaining/improving skills, and all of that is trying to avoid skating into trivial irrelevancy. Got any ideas?
As a meta note, I think that people who cower behind anonymity don’t deserve to make concrete claims about their skill sets without backing them up, so until further notice and on a policy level, I’m treating your claim that you meet 11 out of 14 criteria as a flat-out lie (despite its plausibility overall). You’re currently nothing and nobody and have no skills; that will change as soon as you a) reveal yourself or b) demonstrate credibility under this pseudonym.
Your next attempt to strawman things takes a sub-point out of context and deliberately ignores the actual requirement being made, which was that people hold their beliefs and models with skepticism/realize that their internal experience does not represent absolute truth, and that they treat one another with a behaviorist’s lens, using revealed preferences and past behavior as predictors, rather than relying on mental summations that may be false or straw. I’m curious whether, setting aside your mockery of a subpoint, you agree with that point.
Interestingly enough, I have reasonable credence in your two inferences. In my experience, members of this community do attempt to install norms to compensate for social failings (and do have a somewhat higher-than-average level of social ineptitude). And also, I think many people in this community are low-empathy and embody the bad side of individualism. However, unlike you, I see that a lot of people are trying damn hard to correct this, and I’m curious whether you think they should be written off for not being good enough already, or whether you have specific suggestions that differ from the ones already being tried. I note that a big part of what Dragon Army intends to do is just try a whole bunch of stuff (including stuff already known to work; there’s no premium on novelty), and that I think data will be better than armchair ranting.
I suspect you haven’t done much in the way of looking in the mirror when you type the words “repressed irritation, interpersonal drama, and general unpleasantness.” Certainly you don’t meet any of my standards for “how a decent person behaves.” I’m going to try to avoid the fundamental attribution error here, though, and assume that we’ve hit some combination of a) a bad day, b) the problems of online communication, and c) you being unusually triggered or having run out of some important resources.
I’m not going to engage with the ad hominem attack at the end, which, in addition to being wrong as a tactic, also fails in specific. I think that if you compare yourself, who is suggesting suicide as a solution, with OSC, who is definitely wrong about a lot of things but has never gone so far as to claim a fellow human would be better off killing themselves, you’ll note that you might be on the wrong side. I’d check my cap for a skull, at least in the context of today’s mood.
For anyone else—I welcome calm, reasoned elaboration on any of the on-topic points this person made. When I went through blow-by-blow, there were fewer than I’d hoped, but there are true and valuable and important criticisms here, and I’m glad they’ve been added to the mix, and I wouldn’t mind further discussion of them.
Sure, but it’s fun to be an asshole. I love knocking people down a peg. Especially in public.
Asserting that this isn’t elaborate playacting is not very convincing in light of the fact that your first two proposed group norms are (1) a greeting salute and (2) a call-and-response mechanism. I played the beginning of Final Fantasy XIII two nights ago and thought that was the most cringeworthy stuff I’ve seen in months, but you managed to top even that.
The more important thing here is that you imagine this as a problem that can be solved when in fact if the problem did arise, that would itself preclude it from being easily solved. The “solution” is to not select immature people who you can reasonably expect to get into interpersonal drama, which precludes the vast majority of the rationalist community, which is part of the point of my comment.
I can suggest that you talk to Satvik Beri, and maybe direct him to my comment as well, although I feel slightly bad for potentially causing him to spend time on this.
I mean that the Berkeley rationalist community is a cult in the full and unqualified sense of the word “cult”. You, as a high priest, naturally disagree.
This is a good thing practically by construction.
My point is that this is almost completely unnecessary in a world where people begin by defaulting to behavior that is very unlikely to bother others. I am also gesturing at the following:
The rationalist community does not default to such behavior, which is an indication of the conjunction of near-autistic social skills and remarkably low empathy, and
The rationalist community does not default to such behavior, but instead of anyone pointing out that this is a reasonable thing to default to (c.f. Japanese society), people try to patch it up with legalism, bureaucracy, and a laundry list of rules, which in my experience makes it feel like I’m talking to the low-IQ HR department of a large multinational conglomerate.
The fact that the Berkeley rationalist community seems particularly bad at this is a major red flag in almost every conceivable fashion.
I think they should be thrown off a bridge, either metaphorically or literally. I find it detestable to have them near me at all.
Two questions:
Does it look to you like my irritation is “repressed”?
I’m completely anonymous. Exactly what interpersonal drama am I causing here?
I agree that I can be, when I want to be, a very unpleasant person.
I don’t think you actually succeeded in knocking anyone down a peg, though. I’d bet ~$50 that a neutral, outside observer (say, from a different English speaking country) would say that a) you come off far worse than anyone else in the thread and b) they didn’t find your post convincing.
I think our disagreement over the distinction between playacting and not boils down to something like, I believe that the very small nuts-and-bolts of social interaction (jargon, in-jokes, simple trigger-action responses like sneeze “bless you”) are more important than most people give them credit for. In other words, I think the silly theater ends up actually mattering? Or, to be more specific—I think most of it doesn’t matter, but some small bits of it end up being really important, and so it’s an arena I want to do explicit experimentation with. I want to see whether the small salute actually ends up being relevant to bonding and sense-of-purpose, and no, I don’t have a double blind or anything like that, but I will be asking a bunch of fairly introspective people for their thoughts afterward.
I suspect, from your reaction, that you’d basically assert that this premise is false, and that the … skin? … of social interaction is meaningless, at least compared to the actual connections and information conveyed. This seems like a sensible, plausible position to take, but I think your mockery of the alternative hypothesis is unfounded.
I agree that if romance/sex/etc pop up, that would preclude the problem from being easily solved, but where did you get the impression that I was afraid of attempting to solve hard problems? There’s definitely a filter to screen out immature or uncontrolled people; while you yourself might make it through, the persona you’re currently expressing would’ve been rejected by the second paragraph of your original response. We’ve already turned away people for a variety of reasons, and at least one because of exactly this axis.
I appreciate the recommendation that I run things by Satvik. He’s a perceptive thinker and I haven’t run this by him yet. I wish that you’d responded in specific to more of my requests to draw out your suggestions—you’re continuing to clarify your models of the problems, but not offering much in the way of replacements for the things I’m planning to try.
You’re still not saying what you actually mean by the word “cult.” There’s a decent chance I’d agree with you—I’ve described the Bay Area rationalist community as a cult myself, even recently, when talking to friends and family members. But I was careful to disambiguate exactly what I meant by that, and I can’t help but note that your continued refusal to spell it out makes me suspect that you don’t actually have a coherent thing to say, and are just trying to score easy points.
I agree again with 1 (low empathy, etc.) though I think the strength of the effect is smaller than you seem to think it is. I think that you’re still not believing me when I say I agree with 2? Note that I’m calling you out for unacceptable rudeness in this thread, for instance. I also suspect you have a huge typical mind thing going on, and vastly underestimate how easy it is for people to rub each other wrong while acting in complete good faith in a normal society—the bed example was maybe poorly chosen, but I disagree with you that it’s easy to “default to behavior that is very unlikely to bother others.” I’ve been in a wide range of social milieu, and it’s much less about the actual behavior and much more about people’s cough willingness to pick nits and start fights.
I think that you’ve lost all moral authority by doubling down on your “people should die for this” claim, and because of that, I think this’ll be my last attempt to engage with you as an equal (you’re not my equal; at least this facet of your personality is my clear inferior). I will, however, continue to read if you make those concrete suggestions I’m hoping you have somewhere.
In answer to your last two questions: yes, it looks like your irritation is repressed. Not here, because my main hypothesis is that here is where you finally felt safe to vent a ton of irritation that you’ve been repressing in other arenas, for long amounts of time. Just look back at your first post—maybe a quarter of it was in response to me, and the rest is long-simmering, long-festering frustration about a bunch of other things (some of them valid and some of them not). Textbook repress-then-explode. And 2, your claim that posting anonymously equates to not causing interpersonal drama is again so laughable that unless it’s a deliberate joke, you’re revealing this persona to be less socially aware than literally the most awkward and inept rationalist I’ve ever met.
You’re not unpleasant so much as just … not showing yourself to be worth the time. I really hoped I could get more out of you, because I actually know, on a deep level, that I don’t have all the answers and the opposition is the first best place to look. But in terms of useful-criticism-per-word, you’ve been outdone by every other person who’s registered reservation or disagreement here.
I don’t know if I’m neutral (no, because I have an account here for a while now), but I wouldn’t have the same confidence to swing that bet out of there like you do. The post in and of itself is not convincing enough for me to say that your idea won’t work, but it certainly makes me go “hmm, well, he might have a point there”.
Specifically:
“Normal” people don’t need to explicitly write out all the rules for their housing with regards to social rules.
But here there’s a large list of rules and activitities and all that with the goal of getting group housing to work properly.
Also, here’s some examples of the group of people that you want to source your participants from having low social skills.
By the way, if you set up a ton of rules then it usually won’t work.
Thus, there’s a pretty big chance that the rules will not work out and that the social skills of the participants will be too low to have the group housing work.
I am not convinced that this is the truth.
However, if I read in a year from now that this is what happened, I would not be surprised.
Basically what I’m saying is I can see 1 or 2 people leaving due to drama despite the rules if you try this, with a chance greater than, I dunno, 10%?
You’re looking at content, not status (as implied by ‘knocking someone down a peg’). My immediate reaction to the top-level comment was: “well, they have some good points, but damn are they embarassing themselves with this language”. Possibly shaped by me being generally sceptical about the ideas in the OP.
As far as the bet is about the form of the post, rather than the content, I think Duncan’s pretty safe.
I have seen normies having endless fights about trivial things, such as “who should buy toilet paper”, that a simple explicit norm could solve. (For example “people keep buying the paper in turns, when you buy one check this box to keep everyone informed” or “Joe buys the paper, everyone else gives Joe $2 each month” or whatever.)
The best case, of course, would be trying to be nice by default, and solve explicitly the situations where the default behavior fails. But that seems like what would quite likely happen in the Dragon Army anyway… or maybe I am just applying the typical mind fallacy here.
You should take the Hansonian approach. Fights over toilet paper are not about toilet paper.
I’m not the originator of this thread, but that part did resonate with me. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with those skills, but the combination of choice of skills and the desired level of competency does seem to be decidedly mediocre given the effort and people involved.
1) Above-average physical capacity
What is average? In the US, you could probably be somewhat overweight with no strength, speed, endurance, or agility to speak of and still be “above average.”
(2) Above-average introspection
I would expect almost all of the people who volunteer to be part of a rationalist group house to be there or pretty close to there already.
(3) Above-average planning & execution skill (4) Above-average communication/facilitation skill (5) Above-average calibration/debiasing/rationality knowledge
I think my previous comment applies here as well. Perhaps you have a different conception of “average” than I do, but I think if you’re going to establish a long-term mini-dictatorship of a group house, you should be aiming for quite a bit higher than “above average.”
(6) Above-average scientific lab skill/ability to theorize and rigorously investigate claims
I don’t really understand this one. Is your group house actually going to have the ability to practice conducting laboratory experiments? That’s a very high overhead endeavor.
(7) Average problem-solving/debugging skill (8) Average public speaking skill (9) Average leadership/coordination skill (10) Average teaching and tutoring skill
Average? Your goals are to reach average, after a year of dedicated effort? Getting into the 80th percentile of anything numbered 1-10 on this list should require a minimum of effort on the part of dedicated individuals following strict rules, unless you have some specific medical condition interfering.
(11) Fundamentals of first aid & survival
How fundamental is fundamental? This also shouldn’t take very long if you are willing to put in the effort and practice a bit (2 weeks, at the outside, though you could the true basics in a long weekend). I don’t know how it’s related to the rest of the goals, though, or why it’s important enough to be on the rest of the list. Also, you should practice many of these skills in the actual wilderness, which means time away from everything else.
(12) Fundamentals of financial management
Again, I’m not sure what’s “fundamental.” You could spend 2 days on this, or the entire year.
(13) At least one of: fundamentals of programming, graphic design, writing, A/V/animation, or similar (employable mental skill) (14) At least one of: fundamentals of woodworking, electrical engineering, welding, plumbing, or similar (employable trade skill)
Do you have the ability to teach/practice trade skills at the house? I would expect leaning any of these things, to an employable level, within a year, would require spending time similar to a full-time job somewhere that has infrastructure, in addition to a significant investment of money (at least a few thousand dollars). (I checked some local welding and plumbing classes at community colleges, which is where I’m getting those numbers).
Someone who already has one of these skills (I’m guess you’ll have a few coders at least) is going to be at a tremendous advantage in terms of time and possibly money compared to someone who is not. 13 and 14 are going to each represent a greater time investment than the others combined, unless you already have them.
I don’t know if you care, but I would say I already meet a similar number of these criteria. The only one I definitely don’t meet is 14. I’m willing to tie this account to my real name and explain/prove why I meet them (though some of them would be quite difficult to really prove, I could only argue).
The problem seems to be to be the tradeoff between going deep and going wide, with the added complexity that going deep on the wrong thing seems strictly worse than going wide, and so we’re defaulting to going wide where there’s uncertainty.
Put another way, it’s unlikely that any of those specific skills are going to be particularly important to any of our longest-term goals, but it also seems counterproductive to just sit there thinking about which direction to go in. I’m usually not the biggest expert in the room, but I usually am the most generally competent in terms of being able to fill holes or solve whatever problem crops up, and it’s because I have a habit of just constantly churning and picking up new skills and methods and heuristics wherever I go. I suspect that others would benefit from a similar habit, in particular because once “the right skill” does come along, you have both the affordance to start learning it and a variety of experiences allowing you to learn quickly and efficiently.
That’s a claim. Not necessarily supported, but reasonable, I think, and worth trying out.
I note that I disagree that it’s easy to break averages in all of these things at once. People who don’t actually check their abilities against a standard tend to be wildly overconfident, and people tend to underestimate how long it will take them to learn X or accomplish Y; these things are solidly documented. And while competence does tend to cluster (e.g. “G”), so the picture’s not quite as bleak as the second half of this sentence, once you’ve got a dozen different domains and shooting to be above the 50% mark in all of them, you’re looking at a person who’s approximating one in four thousand, and when you try to get a whole group to hit that mark, the challenge is pretty real. I wouldn’t be surprised if most people have most of this easy, but I think you’re not fully grokking the difficulty of making everybody baseline competent in all of these domains. For instance, you note that many of these skills require only a few weeks, but I don’t know if you added up all of those weeks, compared them to the time commitment, and noted that they’re all being practiced off-hours and people have their own jobs and lives as well.
It’s a floor, though, not a ceiling—we’re aiming at “world class skill,” we’re just not naively expecting that getting there is going to be easy, and initial expectations are meant to be exceeded.
Various additional points …
The trade skill goal got scaled back in response to another comment; it was the hardest/sketchiest one to begin with.
We will have some ability to practice trade skills at the house, and are adopting a norm of going and seeking professional instruction outside from time to time.
I buy that you meet a large number of these criteria; I meet most of them myself. But the ones I don’t have are sticky/tricky.
I don’t think these skills are anywhere near independent. It’s also not obvious that they’re normally distributed. And, being above the 50% mark in a dozen skills by coincidence being unlikely does not at all tell you how hard it is to gain skills if you put in some deliberate work.
I generally am sympathetic to the argument that stuff can be harder than one assumes, but I also am generally cynical about the “average” level of most of these skills. Most people probably don’t even know what “calibration” means precisely enough to test their own level of calibration. I’m not trying to be arrogant here, I pretty much have only heard about the idea of writing down your confidence level of a bunch of predictions and seeing what comes true from the rationalist community and rationalist-adjacent ones.
For the sake of avoiding this issue, and because rather than using terms like “above-average,” I would attempt to pin down ahead of time requirements that are as specific as possible to measure progress in each of the areas you care about.
I don’t think it should take a few weeks each to exceed average in most of these skills. I expect it to take a few weeks total (or 1 day a week for a few months).
I’m plausibly interested in betting a few hundred dollars against you, especially if (as seems likely, given your confidence) you were to bet $1000 against my $250 or something like that. If I imagine the hundred closest people I know uttering the above, I think all but one or two of them are wrong/overconfident.
What statement, specifically, would we be betting on? It’s certainly plausible that I’m underestimating the difficulty in getting an entire group to above these standards in comparison to getting one person. Though, I think the main issue may be a difference in what we perceive as average, rather than a model of how hard learning these skills is.
I spent five minutes trying to operationalize, but I couldn’t come up with anything that seemed workable. For now, we’ll just proceed knowing that at least one of us is wrong. =)
Either way is fine with me, but if you can express in any way what you think “average” is for some of these skills, I would like to know because now I’m really curious.
Thanks for taking so much time to keep responding to a fairly random commenter!
The amount of criteria he hit’s likely depends on the definition of average. The reference class matters a great deal.