Dragon Army previously tried the thing this post recommends trying. I don’t know quite what to make of this; it seems like at least weak evidence that social engineering is hard.
I’ve seen discussion about whether MAPLE is harmful to its members’ epistemics/ability-to-interact-with-the-world (despite being at least rat-adjacent). I don’t have a strong object-level opinion on that. And even if it’s true, that doesn’t mean we can’t take good ideas from them. But it might mean we want to be careful about it?
An outstanding post I have in the works is “Everything is leadership bottlenecked” (with “Intentional Community is leadership bottlenecked” being a special case).
It took a long time to even get one instance of Dragon Army, because you had to get someone who A) had a coherent philosophy, B) was willing to sink huge amount of time and money into a project. And then the project didn’t work out, which isn’t too surprising because most projects don’t. But, we don’t a huge surplus of leaders will doing to organize something like this.
I considered organizing something like Dragon Army, and eventually realized it wouldn’t actually provide enough value relative to other things I could do. What leadership energy I have is invested in things like improving LessWrong (i.e. causing things like the Review to happen).
Some other things that come to mind:
Dragon Army previously tried the thing this post recommends trying. I don’t know quite what to make of this; it seems like at least weak evidence that social engineering is hard.
I’ve seen discussion about whether MAPLE is harmful to its members’ epistemics/ability-to-interact-with-the-world (despite being at least rat-adjacent). I don’t have a strong object-level opinion on that. And even if it’s true, that doesn’t mean we can’t take good ideas from them. But it might mean we want to be careful about it?
Random partial thought:
An outstanding post I have in the works is “Everything is leadership bottlenecked” (with “Intentional Community is leadership bottlenecked” being a special case).
It took a long time to even get one instance of Dragon Army, because you had to get someone who A) had a coherent philosophy, B) was willing to sink huge amount of time and money into a project. And then the project didn’t work out, which isn’t too surprising because most projects don’t. But, we don’t a huge surplus of leaders will doing to organize something like this.
I considered organizing something like Dragon Army, and eventually realized it wouldn’t actually provide enough value relative to other things I could do. What leadership energy I have is invested in things like improving LessWrong (i.e. causing things like the Review to happen).