The most common cause of the collapse of high investment intentional communities is romantic drama.
(Maybe the Dragon Barracks are so obviously a boy thing that you’re taking for granted that there will be no girls in the house, but all the weird non-gendered pronouns like “a Dragon will brush its teeth” imply either an attempt to have a team composed of both men or women, or else a hilarious level of contempt for the agency of your space monkeys. I’m going to assume that you’re imagining mixed gender living arrangements rather than already starting with verbal de-personalization of presumed uniformly male space monkeys...)
So anyway, assuming men and women in the house at the same time, that’s what usually causes things to collapse in the long run.
The two standard failure modes are Bonobo egalitarianism that collapses due to the accumulation of residual jealousies over time or else a harem forms around the charismatic cult leader (which isn’t necessarily a failure mode… it is just a sign of a cult leader whose stated community goals are a load of hypocritical baloney compared to the real goal of getting more than his “fair share” of tail—cue the Limp Bizkit song).
There are lots of patches for this sort of thing that have historically worked for various kinds of communities. Requiring celibacy is an obvious one that monasteries often use. Disallowing any romantic statuses except “single” and “closed dyadic marriage” (with a managed “courting” status to mediate the one way transition) is another standard trick.
Whatever the rule is, the standard enforcement mechanism is “ostracism” because the real problem from a social engineering perspective is the accumulation of complicated feelings that slow and redirect the workings of the social machine away from its stated purposes and towards managing the wreckage of new and old love triangles. If you throw away the cogs that are liable to have “complicated feelings” and replace them with non-complicated cogs… then the machine should continue to run as designed?
(I think maybe the romantic mores that were junked in the US in the 1960′s arose in the first place because villages are kinda like auto-poetic intentional communities. The pragmatically useful norms of village romance, that kept the village from exploding, could be semi-safely junked because (well, obviosuly “the pill” but also because) cities are anonymous and moderately well mixed… essentially everyone in a city is already pre-ostrasized by everyone else, and we each are desperately struggling to create a synthetic village-like community despite the isolating forces of urban mixing. In an already chaotic urban romantic economy a divorce causing additional minor lesioning of the local social graph is like a dust devil in a hurricane. There might actually be a lot of dust devils caused by hurricane turbulence for all I know, but I’m pretty sure no one cares much because the actual hurricane make them irrelevant.)
Anyway, for the above reasons, you might want to just say “this is a fraternity and if women want to start a rationalist sorority that can be a separate thing”. Alternatively, think about romantic norms up front.
One idea that is probably necessary but not sufficient is for the Commander (and anyone else with any authority in the house) to have an absolute commitment not to sleep with anyone else in the house.
Edit: with this rule, a different/earlier version of me might have been interested. Without it I would never be.
Anyway, for the above reasons, you might want to just say “this is a fraternity and if women want to start a rationalist sorority that can be a separate thing”.
Possible advantage of this solution: I’ve noticed that male bonding gets a lot easier when a group goes from being “almost all guys” to “all guys”. (I imagine it would get easier still if you are regularly doing testosterone-elevating things that require coordination with your group of guys, the way sports teams, armies, fraternities, and heavy metal bands do. I suspect men have a pack hunting instinct that gets activated in circumstances like these.)
Data point to the contrary: I spent two years in a closed military unit with 44 guys and 5 girls (in Israel). Each of the girls went through at least a couple of in-unit boyfriends at the time, but that wasn’t a major source of drama. It took quite a bit of suffering to forge the unit bonds (a 4-month combat boot camp to start our service), but by the end of it, people cared about “the unit” as a whole more than about personal drama. I certainly can’t imagine that the “bonding” could have been any stronger without the girls there.
And one final point of support for DA: while I was living in a closed barracks, with five girls, a huge workload, strict rules and significant barriers to exit, I read Ender’s Game and thought “this is exactly like my life, and it’s awesome”.
I agree with some of the critics here that Duncan is overconfident in his ability to make this work. I also agree that there’s a limit to how much you can learn from a work of fiction about space monkey superchildren. But a lot of the criticism here is even more overconfident, and it comes from people who never lived in DA-like situation in their lives so all the evidence they’re basing their criticism on is fictional.
It’s especially worth noting that the group is highly competent and self-selecting for the environment, too, so we’re likely to respond in the same way you did (i.e. if we want to say that your experience “beat outside view,” then we’re pretty well set up for ours to beat outside view similarly, even if that outside view is somewhat unpromising).
it comes from people who never lived in DA-like situation in their lives so all the evidence they’re basing their criticism on is fictional.
I’ve been going off statistics which, AFAIK, aren’t fictional. Am I wrong in my assumption that the military, which seems like a decent comparison point, has an above average rate of sexual harassment, sexual assault, bloated budgets, and bureaucratic waste? All the statistics and research I’ve read suggest that at least the US Military has a lot of problems and should not be used as a role-model.
Listening to the ways that various interviewees talked about the military ethos, and used value language to describe their experiences, I found myself thinking, like we Rogerians do, “What is it they are trying to get me to understand? There is something they are trying to be insistent about, but it’s not clear; what is it?”
Eventually, I found something between the lines. It’s hard to express directly; it works best if we start with what I hypothesize is the other side.
The US military, and probably all militaries ever, have a really quite low tolerance for fuckups. When somebody isn’t dependable, when somebody doesn’t exercise adequate restraint in their conduct, they get marginalized so they can’t do too much damage, or simply gotten rid of.
All these youngsters join up, and have it drummed into them that they have these huge responsibilities to their fellow warriors and their nation, and they must do their jobs right. It’s not just that they have to cover their squad mates in fire-fights, but things like, “If you don’t clean this surface correctly, the guy who is going to try to land a plane on this deck will die and maybe take a bunch of us with it.” And they discover, yes, they have it in them to do their jobs that well, that dependably. They are somebody who pulls their weight and can be counted on.
And furthermore, they discover they are in a whole society of people who are equally determined to be dependable, to pull their weight and be somebody who can be counted on. That can be a down-right rapturous experience; I know, because there’s other ways to have at least some of that experience, such as through the performing arts, and having tasted it, I can attest it’s positively intoxicating. It’s like falling in love. Or maybe it is falling in love: this probably is more the basis of that intense camaraderie shared by veterans who served together than common adversity or common purpose.
Civilian society, as a whole, is, in contrast, replete with fuckups. People who can’t get out of their own way enough to be depended on, people who don’t take commitments seriously, people who are exploitative, who phone it in, to try to get away with minimal contributions, who don’t care about those who rely on their work, who don’t want to be relied upon, people who don’t want to have self-restraint. We don’t get to throw those people out of society, so there they are, being part of civilian society, fucking up, and their fucking up being tolerated.
People in the military, who subscribe to the discipline of speech and courtesy described above, are way, way, way, way, way too polite to actually come out and say, “We’re different from civilians because we’re not used to putting up with fuckups,” but that is what it sounds like is lurking between the lines. It feels like they’re trying to apologetically and politely say something that more bluntly put might sound like, “See, among us, fucking up is not okay; being a fuck up is not okay. We have these values and stuff which say it’s not okay. And we totally get that that’s okay in civilian life, where if you want to be a fuckup, that’s your free choice. In our culture, the military culture, we see that as not a legitimate choice. We see that as bad – and comport ourselves accordingly.”
If I am correct that this is the subtext, it also explains some of the difficulty that discharged service members can experience reintegrating into civilian society. The go-to explanation for difficulties reintegrating is usually PTSD or other socio/emotional “damage” that prevents reintegration. But that would be how civilian society sees it: “if you can’t join us, it must be because you’re broken.” But what if it’s just straight-up acculturative stress, from (re)joining a society with a very different value system, and one which does not support and espouse values that were not merely emotionally important, but plainly and obviously organized the left society in ways one prized?
Personally, I don’t think that the military helps. The claim is implausible as personality traits are pretty stubborn things. Anecdotes are definitely confounded as militaries these days can be selective (literally administering IQ tests), and young men who enlist will mature as a simple matter of time. Military-style boot camps are one of the juvenile justice interventions we can say don’t work well or maybe at all (“Preventing future offending of delinquents and offenders: what have we learned from experiments and meta-analyses?”, Mackenzie & Farrington 2015) despite being aimed at the ‘youngsters’ who ought to most benefit from not being ‘fuckups’ and being aimed much more explicitly at that goal with a lower bar of success. And the natural experiments I know of like the Vietnam War draft lottery show permanent large harms to income from being drafted (most famously, Angrist 1990), which is certainly not what one would expect from a magical organization which turns fuckup civilians into reliable soldiers and explains why super-competent soldiers have such difficulty comporting in & reintegrating into a civilian life of tragic incompetence everywhere.
Some confounds/conflations in the above? Like, I agree with the truth value of the specific examples you’ve cited, but I think I disagree with the implicit claim that they’re necessarily entangled with the thing Kaj is quoting.
e.g. yes, juvenile military institutions don’t prevent people from being deliquent or discourage future criminality, but that’s not to say that they don’t cause those people, while embedded, to be reliable for object-level tasks and deadlines.
Similarly, the absolute horror and chaos that was Vietnam War combat, and the subsequent shredding of the psyches of people who didn’t volunteer to be there, seems fundamentally different from e.g. modern duty on an aircraft carrier or WWII quartermastering. It doesn’t seem incoherent or contradictory to say both [military culture promotes reliability] and also [being drafted in Vietnam screws you up, military schools don’t fix teenage delinquency].
I also note that both examples cited talk about people who don’t self-select in, which—if relevant—wouldn’t surprise me.
I think “implausible because personality traits are pretty stubborn” is an overconfident statement—personality traits are pretty stubborn, but being thoroughly embedded in a culture that forces you to practice certain skills and surrounds you with coherent social pressures is also pretty stubborn. And in point of fact, while within that context, culture clearly dominates over personality traits, whatever else happens afterwards.
If I’ve misunderstood your claims, please forgive and correct—I feel like I might’ve missed your crux.
Duncan’s comment already touched upon this, but just to highlight it: both of your cited studies are about situations where people were literally forced to join against their will; the Vietnam example additionally has those people exposed to the horror that was Vietnam. Being forced to join something against one’s will tends to make people very resistant against the norms advocated there, and even to actively behave in the opposite way as soon as they get out of there. (I’m reminded of all the kids who decided, for many years afterwards, they want to have nothing to do with sports or exercise because they had to suffer through school gym class.) It’s not a condition where you’d even expect to get much of the internalized pride in the group norms, and desire to act accordingly, that was discussed in my quote.
I get that you picked those studies to combat the confounding from selection (both in the military screening its candidates and the candidates themselves self-selecting), but the context of this discussion was “is Dragon Army a good idea”. Dragon Army participants are also going to be both self-selected and heavily screened for suitability, so whether or not this kind of an intervention would work for the population at large isn’t actually the question we’re interested in.
Unfortunately I think at this point the discussion can only go towards a back and forth on what is good and bad about the military, which can’t be very profitable, and this kind of debate has gone on for so long already that it’s embedded into popular culture. It’s also very heavily culture-warish.
Clearly, the military is adapted for one task, which requires an extraordinary amount of dependability and low likelihood of failure. There’s also an extraordinary cost for that low likelihood of failure, which encompasses the things you pointed out. I don’t think any society has survived very long being converted into 100% military culture, nor has it survived getting rid of it completely.
Clearly, the military is adapted for one task, which requires an extraordinary amount of dependability and low likelihood of failure.
Maybe a low likelihood of certain kind of errors for which it optimizes, but not in general. An above average rate of sexual assault is a sign of failure.
The NSA lost their cyber-weapons (maybe to Russian spies) and now you have civilian targets like hospitals getting attacked because they didn’t do their OPSec properly.
Romantic entanglements and their fallout are not ruled out by all male environments even if the members do not identify as homosexual. So still important to consider these issues even if there are no women at all.
Can confirm. I was in a fraternity in college with many gay members, some of whom occasionally hooked up and caused manageable levels of drama. This was a relatively recent phenomenon in the history of the fraternity; I think as recently as 10 years before my time nobody was out, and then some people came out after joining.
Currently there are both men and women interested (though many more men than women).
All of your points above seem sound at first glance, and yes, it’s on the docket to be sorted out. I don’t think I want to go full monastery, but there’s a decent chance the house itself will end up being activity-restricted in some way.
I want to add a strong “romantic entanglements are a big risk” voice.
My worst experience with rationalists (and possibly some of their worst experiences with me) were when romance/sex conflict came up. It turns out people are really bad at being rational when that happens. (This was exacerbated by a lot of people being inexperienced, which may or may not be the case in Dragon Army, but it makes sense for romance and sex drive being something just overwhelms the prefrontal cortex)
The most common cause of the collapse of high investment intentional communities is romantic drama.
(Maybe the Dragon Barracks are so obviously a boy thing that you’re taking for granted that there will be no girls in the house, but all the weird non-gendered pronouns like “a Dragon will brush its teeth” imply either an attempt to have a team composed of both men or women, or else a hilarious level of contempt for the agency of your space monkeys. I’m going to assume that you’re imagining mixed gender living arrangements rather than already starting with verbal de-personalization of presumed uniformly male space monkeys...)
So anyway, assuming men and women in the house at the same time, that’s what usually causes things to collapse in the long run.
The two standard failure modes are Bonobo egalitarianism that collapses due to the accumulation of residual jealousies over time or else a harem forms around the charismatic cult leader (which isn’t necessarily a failure mode… it is just a sign of a cult leader whose stated community goals are a load of hypocritical baloney compared to the real goal of getting more than his “fair share” of tail—cue the Limp Bizkit song).
There are lots of patches for this sort of thing that have historically worked for various kinds of communities. Requiring celibacy is an obvious one that monasteries often use. Disallowing any romantic statuses except “single” and “closed dyadic marriage” (with a managed “courting” status to mediate the one way transition) is another standard trick.
Whatever the rule is, the standard enforcement mechanism is “ostracism” because the real problem from a social engineering perspective is the accumulation of complicated feelings that slow and redirect the workings of the social machine away from its stated purposes and towards managing the wreckage of new and old love triangles. If you throw away the cogs that are liable to have “complicated feelings” and replace them with non-complicated cogs… then the machine should continue to run as designed?
(I think maybe the romantic mores that were junked in the US in the 1960′s arose in the first place because villages are kinda like auto-poetic intentional communities. The pragmatically useful norms of village romance, that kept the village from exploding, could be semi-safely junked because (well, obviosuly “the pill” but also because) cities are anonymous and moderately well mixed… essentially everyone in a city is already pre-ostrasized by everyone else, and we each are desperately struggling to create a synthetic village-like community despite the isolating forces of urban mixing. In an already chaotic urban romantic economy a divorce causing additional minor lesioning of the local social graph is like a dust devil in a hurricane. There might actually be a lot of dust devils caused by hurricane turbulence for all I know, but I’m pretty sure no one cares much because the actual hurricane make them irrelevant.)
Anyway, for the above reasons, you might want to just say “this is a fraternity and if women want to start a rationalist sorority that can be a separate thing”. Alternatively, think about romantic norms up front.
One idea that is probably necessary but not sufficient is for the Commander (and anyone else with any authority in the house) to have an absolute commitment not to sleep with anyone else in the house.
Edit: with this rule, a different/earlier version of me might have been interested. Without it I would never be.
Possible advantage of this solution: I’ve noticed that male bonding gets a lot easier when a group goes from being “almost all guys” to “all guys”. (I imagine it would get easier still if you are regularly doing testosterone-elevating things that require coordination with your group of guys, the way sports teams, armies, fraternities, and heavy metal bands do. I suspect men have a pack hunting instinct that gets activated in circumstances like these.)
Data point to the contrary: I spent two years in a closed military unit with 44 guys and 5 girls (in Israel). Each of the girls went through at least a couple of in-unit boyfriends at the time, but that wasn’t a major source of drama. It took quite a bit of suffering to forge the unit bonds (a 4-month combat boot camp to start our service), but by the end of it, people cared about “the unit” as a whole more than about personal drama. I certainly can’t imagine that the “bonding” could have been any stronger without the girls there.
And one final point of support for DA: while I was living in a closed barracks, with five girls, a huge workload, strict rules and significant barriers to exit, I read Ender’s Game and thought “this is exactly like my life, and it’s awesome”.
I agree with some of the critics here that Duncan is overconfident in his ability to make this work. I also agree that there’s a limit to how much you can learn from a work of fiction about space monkey superchildren. But a lot of the criticism here is even more overconfident, and it comes from people who never lived in DA-like situation in their lives so all the evidence they’re basing their criticism on is fictional.
It’s especially worth noting that the group is highly competent and self-selecting for the environment, too, so we’re likely to respond in the same way you did (i.e. if we want to say that your experience “beat outside view,” then we’re pretty well set up for ours to beat outside view similarly, even if that outside view is somewhat unpromising).
I’ve been going off statistics which, AFAIK, aren’t fictional. Am I wrong in my assumption that the military, which seems like a decent comparison point, has an above average rate of sexual harassment, sexual assault, bloated budgets, and bureaucratic waste? All the statistics and research I’ve read suggest that at least the US Military has a lot of problems and should not be used as a role-model.
Counterpoint:
Personally, I don’t think that the military helps. The claim is implausible as personality traits are pretty stubborn things. Anecdotes are definitely confounded as militaries these days can be selective (literally administering IQ tests), and young men who enlist will mature as a simple matter of time. Military-style boot camps are one of the juvenile justice interventions we can say don’t work well or maybe at all (“Preventing future offending of delinquents and offenders: what have we learned from experiments and meta-analyses?”, Mackenzie & Farrington 2015) despite being aimed at the ‘youngsters’ who ought to most benefit from not being ‘fuckups’ and being aimed much more explicitly at that goal with a lower bar of success. And the natural experiments I know of like the Vietnam War draft lottery show permanent large harms to income from being drafted (most famously, Angrist 1990), which is certainly not what one would expect from a magical organization which turns fuckup civilians into reliable soldiers and explains why super-competent soldiers have such difficulty comporting in & reintegrating into a civilian life of tragic incompetence everywhere.
Some confounds/conflations in the above? Like, I agree with the truth value of the specific examples you’ve cited, but I think I disagree with the implicit claim that they’re necessarily entangled with the thing Kaj is quoting.
e.g. yes, juvenile military institutions don’t prevent people from being deliquent or discourage future criminality, but that’s not to say that they don’t cause those people, while embedded, to be reliable for object-level tasks and deadlines.
Similarly, the absolute horror and chaos that was Vietnam War combat, and the subsequent shredding of the psyches of people who didn’t volunteer to be there, seems fundamentally different from e.g. modern duty on an aircraft carrier or WWII quartermastering. It doesn’t seem incoherent or contradictory to say both [military culture promotes reliability] and also [being drafted in Vietnam screws you up, military schools don’t fix teenage delinquency].
I also note that both examples cited talk about people who don’t self-select in, which—if relevant—wouldn’t surprise me.
I think “implausible because personality traits are pretty stubborn” is an overconfident statement—personality traits are pretty stubborn, but being thoroughly embedded in a culture that forces you to practice certain skills and surrounds you with coherent social pressures is also pretty stubborn. And in point of fact, while within that context, culture clearly dominates over personality traits, whatever else happens afterwards.
If I’ve misunderstood your claims, please forgive and correct—I feel like I might’ve missed your crux.
Duncan’s comment already touched upon this, but just to highlight it: both of your cited studies are about situations where people were literally forced to join against their will; the Vietnam example additionally has those people exposed to the horror that was Vietnam. Being forced to join something against one’s will tends to make people very resistant against the norms advocated there, and even to actively behave in the opposite way as soon as they get out of there. (I’m reminded of all the kids who decided, for many years afterwards, they want to have nothing to do with sports or exercise because they had to suffer through school gym class.) It’s not a condition where you’d even expect to get much of the internalized pride in the group norms, and desire to act accordingly, that was discussed in my quote.
I get that you picked those studies to combat the confounding from selection (both in the military screening its candidates and the candidates themselves self-selecting), but the context of this discussion was “is Dragon Army a good idea”. Dragon Army participants are also going to be both self-selected and heavily screened for suitability, so whether or not this kind of an intervention would work for the population at large isn’t actually the question we’re interested in.
An actual military has life-and-death work. This might even be more important than consent.
A military-style “boot camp” for delinquents is a cargo cult by comparison.
Unfortunately I think at this point the discussion can only go towards a back and forth on what is good and bad about the military, which can’t be very profitable, and this kind of debate has gone on for so long already that it’s embedded into popular culture. It’s also very heavily culture-warish.
Clearly, the military is adapted for one task, which requires an extraordinary amount of dependability and low likelihood of failure. There’s also an extraordinary cost for that low likelihood of failure, which encompasses the things you pointed out. I don’t think any society has survived very long being converted into 100% military culture, nor has it survived getting rid of it completely.
Maybe a low likelihood of certain kind of errors for which it optimizes, but not in general. An above average rate of sexual assault is a sign of failure.
Losing track of money in the middle of a war that might go to anyone is also a failure (https://www.theguardian.com/world/2007/feb/08/usa.iraq1).
The NSA lost their cyber-weapons (maybe to Russian spies) and now you have civilian targets like hospitals getting attacked because they didn’t do their OPSec properly.
The US military accidentally bombs hospitals.
Romantic entanglements and their fallout are not ruled out by all male environments even if the members do not identify as homosexual. So still important to consider these issues even if there are no women at all.
Can confirm. I was in a fraternity in college with many gay members, some of whom occasionally hooked up and caused manageable levels of drama. This was a relatively recent phenomenon in the history of the fraternity; I think as recently as 10 years before my time nobody was out, and then some people came out after joining.
Currently there are both men and women interested (though many more men than women).
All of your points above seem sound at first glance, and yes, it’s on the docket to be sorted out. I don’t think I want to go full monastery, but there’s a decent chance the house itself will end up being activity-restricted in some way.
Thanks for the detailed model-sharing.
I want to add a strong “romantic entanglements are a big risk” voice.
My worst experience with rationalists (and possibly some of their worst experiences with me) were when romance/sex conflict came up. It turns out people are really bad at being rational when that happens. (This was exacerbated by a lot of people being inexperienced, which may or may not be the case in Dragon Army, but it makes sense for romance and sex drive being something just overwhelms the prefrontal cortex)
I’m glad the model was deemed useful :-) Good luck.