I am almost certain the answer is “at least a little bit”.
I agree. The effect would probably be pretty big, in fact.
Even with something fairly low-tech (webcams, you look at your screen and you see little stamp-sized videos of the faces of everybody), a weekly videoconference to discuss all things rational would be a big motivator, IMO.
Just imagining it feels motivating, possibly because right now when I think of the people here, I mostly see screennames (except for Eliezer, but that’s because I’ve seen videos of him), and for obvious evolutionary reasons that doesn’t generate the same response as seeing human faces (f.ex. over the past few weeks I’ve been asking myself: Who’s Yvain? Where is he from? What does he do? How old is he? What does he look like? Even if I know that this shouldn’t, in theory, be important for the purpose of reading his stuff).
Maybe just a voice conference call could be useful (http://www.freeconferencecall.com/ ?). It probably can’t replace the written word for the purpose of teaching rationality, but it can certainly help make all of this more real from a human point of view, and thus motivate us. And like a religious gathering, not everybody has to speak to feel part of it.
Real life example: For the past 3-4 years I’ve been working from home (in Canada) for a US company. At first we did almost everything via email and text chat. Then we started doing a few conference calls and that helped make it more real and improve esprit de corps a lot. But the game-changer was really when they flew all of us to New York to meet face to face. The effect of that is still felt; even more than a year later there’s a different rapport with the people I met face to face than with those that joined after that meeting.
Maybe we should make video of ourselves available, just so we seem more real? Maybe we should be doing promiscuous bloggingheads.tv-style conversations?
I agree. The effect would probably be pretty big, in fact.
Even with something fairly low-tech (webcams, you look at your screen and you see little stamp-sized videos of the faces of everybody), a weekly videoconference to discuss all things rational would be a big motivator, IMO.
Just imagining it feels motivating, possibly because right now when I think of the people here, I mostly see screennames (except for Eliezer, but that’s because I’ve seen videos of him), and for obvious evolutionary reasons that doesn’t generate the same response as seeing human faces (f.ex. over the past few weeks I’ve been asking myself: Who’s Yvain? Where is he from? What does he do? How old is he? What does he look like? Even if I know that this shouldn’t, in theory, be important for the purpose of reading his stuff).
Maybe just a voice conference call could be useful (http://www.freeconferencecall.com/ ?). It probably can’t replace the written word for the purpose of teaching rationality, but it can certainly help make all of this more real from a human point of view, and thus motivate us. And like a religious gathering, not everybody has to speak to feel part of it.
Real life example: For the past 3-4 years I’ve been working from home (in Canada) for a US company. At first we did almost everything via email and text chat. Then we started doing a few conference calls and that helped make it more real and improve esprit de corps a lot. But the game-changer was really when they flew all of us to New York to meet face to face. The effect of that is still felt; even more than a year later there’s a different rapport with the people I met face to face than with those that joined after that meeting.
...suggesting that the single thing I could do to make the biggest improvement to the world with the least effort would be to fix this bug:
http://code.google.com/p/lesswrong/issues/detail?id=108
Maybe we should make video of ourselves available, just so we seem more real? Maybe we should be doing promiscuous bloggingheads.tv-style conversations?