When deciding who to put in power and how much power to give them, the principle of charity is harmful.
It seems to me that institutions that claim to make you better in every way are always scams. The fact that a school will teach you only welding, and will give you a welder certificate in a certain number of weeks if you keep showing up, is a feature. If you join two or three institutions according to your interests, you’ll be fully booked in both self-improvement and social interaction, and it’s still less costly or risky than joining an authoritarian commune.
When deciding who to put in power and how much power to give them, the principle of charity is harmful.
There’s healthy skepticism and then there’s twisting words wildly beyond any reasonable interpretation...
Also the level of skepticism should be proportionate to the level of authority requested; it makes sense to be more skeptical the more power someone wants. But my reading of the original post agrees with Sinal’s reading, who compares the level of authoritarianism with that of a Boy Scout troop leader. The original post has stuff like the first rule of conduct for a dragon being to protect themselves; it mentioned that people can “hard veto” proposed experimental norms; people are free to leave the experiment if they wish. Duncan’s authority seems to be limited to upholding policies that were agreed upon by group consensus and running them for a limited time; he has mentioned in the comments that he can be removed from power using the kind of procedures one would expect, e.g. a majority vote. The specific examples of his “tyrannical” powers that were given were things like deciding that a specific meeting will be held on Tuesdays even though not everyone wants the meeting to be on a Tuesday.
The Boy Scout troop leader probably has more power over his scouts than Duncan has in the house, and I doubt we’d consider people obviously unsuitable to be scout leaders for the sin of suggesting that scouts should assume good intent in their dealings with each other.
You’re talking like joining this commune would be a huge enormous risk, and I just don’t see that. Sure there’s a risk, but it’s on the same order as joining any other commune or moving in with other roommates—you risk having a miserable time for a while if it turns out you’re not a good fit for each other, and then things may be inconvenient for a while as you need to look for a new place where to live.
Personally I made the mistake of moving in with some wildly incompatible roommates at least once, and have also on other occasions lived together with other people who I’d strongly have preferred not to live together with. Yes, it sucked a lot and made me much more miserable than I probably would have been otherwise. But then I moved out and don’t think I’ve suffered any lasting consequences, and despite the unpleasantness I still don’t consider it a risk on the order of “has to absolutely be avoided”.
It seems to me that institutions that claim to make you better in every way are always scams. The fact that a school will teach you only welding, and will give you a welder certificate in a certain number of weeks if you keep showing up, is a feature.
Agreed that this is a feature: sometimes one really does only want to learn welding. But if you want to learn dancing and everyone’s only teaching welding, with all the places that claim to teach dancing actually being scams… then that’s a major problem for you, and suggests that you’d get a lot out of it if someone did found a dancing school that actually taught dancing and wasn’t a scam.
I think claiming to teach skills that aren’t taught by any traditional institutions is fishy. (This isn’t an isolated demand, I’ve argued with CFAR folks that they should prioritize research into testing rationality, instead of jumping head first into teaching it.)
Yeah, when we want to learn things beyond the expertise of a house member (such as when we learned to use firearms during the weekend experiment) we bring in professional help.
The post says it will help you achieve three goals, of which self-improvement is the most important, and gives a list of 15 skills it will help you learn (many of which are fishy by my standard above).
When deciding who to put in power and how much power to give them, the principle of charity is harmful.
It seems to me that institutions that claim to make you better in every way are always scams. The fact that a school will teach you only welding, and will give you a welder certificate in a certain number of weeks if you keep showing up, is a feature. If you join two or three institutions according to your interests, you’ll be fully booked in both self-improvement and social interaction, and it’s still less costly or risky than joining an authoritarian commune.
There’s healthy skepticism and then there’s twisting words wildly beyond any reasonable interpretation...
Also the level of skepticism should be proportionate to the level of authority requested; it makes sense to be more skeptical the more power someone wants. But my reading of the original post agrees with Sinal’s reading, who compares the level of authoritarianism with that of a Boy Scout troop leader. The original post has stuff like the first rule of conduct for a dragon being to protect themselves; it mentioned that people can “hard veto” proposed experimental norms; people are free to leave the experiment if they wish. Duncan’s authority seems to be limited to upholding policies that were agreed upon by group consensus and running them for a limited time; he has mentioned in the comments that he can be removed from power using the kind of procedures one would expect, e.g. a majority vote. The specific examples of his “tyrannical” powers that were given were things like deciding that a specific meeting will be held on Tuesdays even though not everyone wants the meeting to be on a Tuesday.
The Boy Scout troop leader probably has more power over his scouts than Duncan has in the house, and I doubt we’d consider people obviously unsuitable to be scout leaders for the sin of suggesting that scouts should assume good intent in their dealings with each other.
You’re talking like joining this commune would be a huge enormous risk, and I just don’t see that. Sure there’s a risk, but it’s on the same order as joining any other commune or moving in with other roommates—you risk having a miserable time for a while if it turns out you’re not a good fit for each other, and then things may be inconvenient for a while as you need to look for a new place where to live.
Personally I made the mistake of moving in with some wildly incompatible roommates at least once, and have also on other occasions lived together with other people who I’d strongly have preferred not to live together with. Yes, it sucked a lot and made me much more miserable than I probably would have been otherwise. But then I moved out and don’t think I’ve suffered any lasting consequences, and despite the unpleasantness I still don’t consider it a risk on the order of “has to absolutely be avoided”.
Agreed that this is a feature: sometimes one really does only want to learn welding. But if you want to learn dancing and everyone’s only teaching welding, with all the places that claim to teach dancing actually being scams… then that’s a major problem for you, and suggests that you’d get a lot out of it if someone did found a dancing school that actually taught dancing and wasn’t a scam.
I think claiming to teach skills that aren’t taught by any traditional institutions is fishy. (This isn’t an isolated demand, I’ve argued with CFAR folks that they should prioritize research into testing rationality, instead of jumping head first into teaching it.)
Duncan’s project isn’t really about teaching skills, though.
Yeah, when we want to learn things beyond the expertise of a house member (such as when we learned to use firearms during the weekend experiment) we bring in professional help.
The post says it will help you achieve three goals, of which self-improvement is the most important, and gives a list of 15 skills it will help you learn (many of which are fishy by my standard above).