I’m noticing an unspoken assumption: that Amish culture hasn’t changed “much” since the 1800s. If that’s not the case… it’s not that anything here would necessarily be false, but it would be an important omission.
Like, taking this post as something that it’s not-quite but also not-really-not, it uses the Amish as an example in support of a thesis: “cultural engineering is possible”. You can, as a society, decide where you want your society to go and then go there. The Amish are an existence proof, and Ray bounces from them to asking how others can do it? What can we use from the Amish, and what is unlikely to work because the Amish had certain advantages we lack?
But this only really makes sense if the Amish managed to steer their culture successfully. If they put a bunch of effort into social engineering and got random results, such that their society is now different from broader US society but also different from what they started with, they don’t tell us much. Or, different from what they started with might be fine, but we’d want it to be mostly deliberately different.
(If the Amish are mostly just trying to keep their society the same, that seems like another advantage they had that the post doesn’t mention. Staying still seems easier than moving in a specific direction.)
So, in what ways is Amish culture different since the 1800s? Have changes been deliberate (like “it would be good to change like this”), or forced (like “we can’t stay the same in the face of X, we need to make one of this set of changes, we choose this one”), or accidental (like “whoops suddenly we have a completely different opinion on some important question”)? What would the Amish of each (say) 50-year time period think of the Amish from the next one?
I think if I tried to answer these questions here, this review would never get posted. I don’t know much about the Amish myself. But they seem worth flagging. Depending on the answer to them, the post might turn out to have important omissions.
Thanks to Jacob Lagerros for comments on this review
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).
I like this post a lot.
I’m noticing an unspoken assumption: that Amish culture hasn’t changed “much” since the 1800s. If that’s not the case… it’s not that anything here would necessarily be false, but it would be an important omission.
Like, taking this post as something that it’s not-quite but also not-really-not, it uses the Amish as an example in support of a thesis: “cultural engineering is possible”. You can, as a society, decide where you want your society to go and then go there. The Amish are an existence proof, and Ray bounces from them to asking how others can do it? What can we use from the Amish, and what is unlikely to work because the Amish had certain advantages we lack?
But this only really makes sense if the Amish managed to steer their culture successfully. If they put a bunch of effort into social engineering and got random results, such that their society is now different from broader US society but also different from what they started with, they don’t tell us much. Or, different from what they started with might be fine, but we’d want it to be mostly deliberately different.
(If the Amish are mostly just trying to keep their society the same, that seems like another advantage they had that the post doesn’t mention. Staying still seems easier than moving in a specific direction.)
So, in what ways is Amish culture different since the 1800s? Have changes been deliberate (like “it would be good to change like this”), or forced (like “we can’t stay the same in the face of X, we need to make one of this set of changes, we choose this one”), or accidental (like “whoops suddenly we have a completely different opinion on some important question”)? What would the Amish of each (say) 50-year time period think of the Amish from the next one?
I think if I tried to answer these questions here, this review would never get posted. I don’t know much about the Amish myself. But they seem worth flagging. Depending on the answer to them, the post might turn out to have important omissions.
Thanks to Jacob Lagerros for comments on this review
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).