Thanks for the long and detailed response. I enjoyed reading it.
It’s interesting that you highlight meta as being a dangerous failure mode—I actually strongly agree, which is why the aesthetic is tuned toward stuff like “just exercise” and “housemates should produce visible work.” My sense is that a strategy of just doing stuff outstrips in practice a strategy of think really hard until you find the ideal move, especially when you take into account how many iterations you can get in if you’re churning hard.
Hilariously, though, I’m further inside the rationalist bubble than I thought, because I accept your overall summation even though the intent was to be THE OBJECT LEVEL HOUSE (or at least, the house that does stuff even if it goes meta on norms). I still think we’re set up to be relatively ahead, but as you point out, that’s not necessarily a sufficient bar.
However, I’m much more concerned with:
In addition to being too meta, I also suspect this experiment is too complex. Experimenting with a bunch of different norms, on top of the code of conduct and daily schedule, seems wildly ambitious to me.
That rings very true to me, and has been an active concern of mine for the past couple of weeks. It seems like there are something like a hundred activities/experiments/norms/projects that are worthy of including in this, and something like 1.3 slots per week (and thus not even room for half), and I’m not at all certain how to best pick and choose and prioritize and optimize for success. In part, I’m hoping that if we just throw ourselves in and iterate (see above) we’ll do better than if we agonize, but yeah, there are a lot of moving parts, and I wouldn’t be surprised if we ended up trying to drastically simplify in like our fifth week house meeting.
If I had to really zero in on basics, I think they are:
Never give up on an experiment until its predetermined end date
Spend ~20 hours a week actually interacting in the same physical space as housemates (at least a subset)
… those, I think, are the iron core of the project.
Spend ~20 hours a week actually interacting in the same physical space as housemates (at least a subset)
I’m curious why this is so important to you, unless that it’s just something to try out. I currently live alone and I like it that way, and I see no reason why spending more time with other people would be such a great thing.
You seem really rigid about excuses though. I think the tendency will be that people will come up with an excuse which one finds it unpleasant or difficult to dispute. For example, when I was in the data science bootcamp in Berkeley, people would very frequently say, “I’m sick and I will be working from home today.” Now a lot of people were in fact sick precisely because of so much physical proximity. But it was very obvious in many cases that the basic reason they were staying home was that they were tired of all the company and felt the need to get away. They did not however feel comfortable saying, “I just feel the need to get away.”
The same thing was true when I lived in a monastery. You could not say “I just feel like sleeping in this morning,” so people said “I didn’t come this morning because I didn’t feel well.” We all knew that this simply meant they were tired and felt like sleeping in. But no one is comfortable confronting someone with the fact that they’re not really sick if they say they are.
The focus on physical presence is a combination of research showing that it matters (there’s some stuff I’ve collected from Dunbar, for example) and strong personal intuition from past experience. In many ways, it’s the core of the thing being tested out, but I have a lot of weight on “it turns out to matter more than just about anything else.”
re: excuses, the intention of the house is Not To Do The Stupid Thing.
Clearly, “mental health” days are a real phenomenon—I’ve taken some myself. And on a larger scale, psych blockers/motivational issues are also real. So it’d be stupid to a) pretend they don’t happen, and b) push directly against them all the time, and never look at undercutting them or working around them. This plan pushes directly against them some, with commitments to just show up anyway, but that’s not the only tool—one of the things I hope to do is increase the candor of all housemates, at least within the context of the house. This will take some practice and reinforcement, but I much prefer a norm of “Huh. I notice I just really didn’t want to show up today” --> figure out what’s going on and address it systematically, to a norm of “little white lie that nobody calls out.”
It’s also worth noting that the house has a pretty high introvert quotient, so there will be a lot of us (myself included) who are motivated to safeguard systems giving one the ability to get away from people for a while.
Thanks for the long and detailed response. I enjoyed reading it.
It’s interesting that you highlight meta as being a dangerous failure mode—I actually strongly agree, which is why the aesthetic is tuned toward stuff like “just exercise” and “housemates should produce visible work.” My sense is that a strategy of just doing stuff outstrips in practice a strategy of think really hard until you find the ideal move, especially when you take into account how many iterations you can get in if you’re churning hard.
Hilariously, though, I’m further inside the rationalist bubble than I thought, because I accept your overall summation even though the intent was to be THE OBJECT LEVEL HOUSE (or at least, the house that does stuff even if it goes meta on norms). I still think we’re set up to be relatively ahead, but as you point out, that’s not necessarily a sufficient bar.
However, I’m much more concerned with:
That rings very true to me, and has been an active concern of mine for the past couple of weeks. It seems like there are something like a hundred activities/experiments/norms/projects that are worthy of including in this, and something like 1.3 slots per week (and thus not even room for half), and I’m not at all certain how to best pick and choose and prioritize and optimize for success. In part, I’m hoping that if we just throw ourselves in and iterate (see above) we’ll do better than if we agonize, but yeah, there are a lot of moving parts, and I wouldn’t be surprised if we ended up trying to drastically simplify in like our fifth week house meeting.
If I had to really zero in on basics, I think they are:
Never give up on an experiment until its predetermined end date
Spend ~20 hours a week actually interacting in the same physical space as housemates (at least a subset)
… those, I think, are the iron core of the project.
I’m curious why this is so important to you, unless that it’s just something to try out. I currently live alone and I like it that way, and I see no reason why spending more time with other people would be such a great thing.
You seem really rigid about excuses though. I think the tendency will be that people will come up with an excuse which one finds it unpleasant or difficult to dispute. For example, when I was in the data science bootcamp in Berkeley, people would very frequently say, “I’m sick and I will be working from home today.” Now a lot of people were in fact sick precisely because of so much physical proximity. But it was very obvious in many cases that the basic reason they were staying home was that they were tired of all the company and felt the need to get away. They did not however feel comfortable saying, “I just feel the need to get away.”
The same thing was true when I lived in a monastery. You could not say “I just feel like sleeping in this morning,” so people said “I didn’t come this morning because I didn’t feel well.” We all knew that this simply meant they were tired and felt like sleeping in. But no one is comfortable confronting someone with the fact that they’re not really sick if they say they are.
The focus on physical presence is a combination of research showing that it matters (there’s some stuff I’ve collected from Dunbar, for example) and strong personal intuition from past experience. In many ways, it’s the core of the thing being tested out, but I have a lot of weight on “it turns out to matter more than just about anything else.”
re: excuses, the intention of the house is Not To Do The Stupid Thing.
Clearly, “mental health” days are a real phenomenon—I’ve taken some myself. And on a larger scale, psych blockers/motivational issues are also real. So it’d be stupid to a) pretend they don’t happen, and b) push directly against them all the time, and never look at undercutting them or working around them. This plan pushes directly against them some, with commitments to just show up anyway, but that’s not the only tool—one of the things I hope to do is increase the candor of all housemates, at least within the context of the house. This will take some practice and reinforcement, but I much prefer a norm of “Huh. I notice I just really didn’t want to show up today” --> figure out what’s going on and address it systematically, to a norm of “little white lie that nobody calls out.”
It’s also worth noting that the house has a pretty high introvert quotient, so there will be a lot of us (myself included) who are motivated to safeguard systems giving one the ability to get away from people for a while.