There’s a lot to learn from your posts and I appreciate your effort. But speaking for myself, if the LW community follows this route en masse, it’ll make me sad and eventually drive me away. I don’t want to be associated with anything that uses such techniques to spread.
I think that you are responding to the post at too low a level of abstraction.
One of the pleasures of reading Isaac Asimov’s Foundation is the scene in which Harry Seldon demonstrates the power of Psychohistory by designing an organisation, a variation of the Womens’s Institute, that grows and grows and grows. (And one of the shocks of re-reading Foundation is that the scene isn’t actually in that book. Where is it?). Ones intuition is that there are laws governing the dynamics of society and the rise and fall of empires. Can we discern enough of those laws to make sure that rationalism flourishes?
calcsam’s post contains much food for thought, and I envy his plain, simple prose style. Hence my praise.
Reading between the lines to detect and reject a suggestion that we turn Less Wrong into a church along the line of Latter-day Saints is a mistake. Food for thought should be digested not puked up.
Some rationalists come unstuck by becoming addicted to alcohol. Do we want a no-drinking rule, like the Latter-day Saints have? I don’t think we should even be asking the question. I don’t think it is helpful to draw parallels so closely. But we don’t have to just drop the issue.
We are aware of over-confidence bias. Perhaps that is related to alcoholism. It is no secret that alcohol is can be dangerously addictive. Any-one who lives in a big city sees the down and outs living on the street. And yet the problem of alcoholism self-limits at a fairly high level, as though people can see the danger and are over-confident of their own ability to avoid it.
It would be cool if rationalists could win in the sense of the rationalist community having a low rate of alcoholism. We are not interested in trying to do that by having a no-drinking rule, but that doesn’t mean we are not interested in trying by other means.
Suppose, for the sake of argument, that over-confidence bias (I can handle it, it won’t happen to me) is part of the cause of alcoholism. The means of combating alcoholism that align with our values is to find ways of bridging the gap between an academic understanding (that people in general are over-confident) and a personal understanding (that maybe I need to cut back my drinking because I am over-confident about being able to handle it.) I don’t think any-one feels threatened by a community norm of helping each other to bridge the academic/personal gap.
Another example is the Latter-day Saints rule against coffee. Not for us, obviously. On the other hand we are into self-experimentation. Try it and see. Nullius in verbia. That makes us a bit different. Most people who try giving up coffee to see if it makes their own life better face ribbing from their friends. The rationalist community could be more supportive than that. So we can look at calcsam’s post and be inspired to build a community around our own values and see how others, with different values, go about it.
Thanks Alan. You get my point. But even if rationalists don’t adopt any LDS norms—and I don’t expected them/us to (I’m hovering at the edge of the community at the moment) -- understanding that the framework here should be helpful.
I don’t want to be associated with anything that uses such techniques to spread.
Which techniques are you referring to? Techniques developed by the LDS, or techniques that have some other property?
I saw two concrete techniques in this post. “Help people implement positive changes through regular interaction” and “use brevity in your promotional materials.” I can see problems with each of them, but I cannot see why those problems make them negative overall.
For the first, you might argue that you want Less Wrong to only comprise self-starters. I would direct you to the posts about akrasia, specifically the ones which detail how social influence can cut down on akrasia.
For the second, you might argue that we only want people with the high IQs and available free time who can get through the Sequences as they are. While the first might be desirable, I’m unsure about the second- Are the Sequences really the shortest they could possibly be? Should we really be attracting the people who are willing to read tens of thousands of words before getting results, instead of proving our positive effects to others before asking them to commit?
My complaint isn’t that the proposed meme-spreading techniques lack effectiveness. I agree that they’re likely to be effective. My complaint is that I avoid people and communities that use such techniques, so if LW starts using them, I’ll start avoiding LW.
My biggest concern is that simply spreading the memes will be counterproductive if they are not spread properly (partial understanding would be a huge concern). If everyone is just guessing the teacher’s password, we will have probably done more damage than good.
I too have reservations about this material. But, I suspect that your recoiling and mine might stem from the representativeness heuristic—that anything associated with religion or its propagation techniques is Dark. I have a lot of negative associations there, and I’m betting many here do. However, religion’s propagation techniques are unquestionably powerful, and we should be able to learn from them.
To counteract this bias somewhat, imagine having some system—I don’t know the details yet, and neither do you—that would easily introduce the core concepts of rationality to anyone interested, and would make it easy to adopt those personal practices that one found positive or useful. Would this be a good thing?
I think so, yes, and clearly so—if improved decision-making, easier willful action, and clearer analysis were already widespread, we’d all live with fewer of other people’s bad decisions. Certainly, the clarity I’ve learned here has helped me; I’m willing to bet it’d help others as well.
If spreading rationality—or, at least, making rationality more palatably available—is a good thing, then we should as a community figure out what works to do that. If certain specific meme-spreading techniques are Dark or noxious, then we should identify what’s wrong in them, and see if we can eliminate them without making the technique wholly ineffective.
So, can you identify what parts of those techniques are noxious to you?
The OP’s previous post
described a model of rationalist communities where you have “distillers” and “organizers” telling people to do stuff, some of which will be proselytizing. But I don’t like being told what to do or telling others what to do, especially if it’s proselytizing. So I would have no place in a such a community.
Also it seems to me that when a product needs to be resold by its consumers, like religion or Amway, that means the product probably isn’t any good. Imagine Steve Jobs using MLM to sell the iPhone! If Eliezer’s ideas about solving confusing problems actually helped, some of the many researchers who read LW would’ve found them useful and told us about it. And if the sequences were as useful in everyday life as they are well-written, a lot of people would have demonstrated that convincingly by now. In either case we would have an iPhone situation and would beat customers off with a stick, not struggle to attract them.
ETA: this comment is a joint reply to Vaniver, XFrequentist, fiddlemath and Davorak, because their questions were quite similar :-)
Okay, but also imagine Steve Jobs trying to sell the original iPod or iMac (before Apple’s huge rebound in popularity) with no TV ads, billboards, posters, product placements, press releases, slogans, over-hyped conferences, or presence in retail stores; just a website with a bunch of extremely long articles explaining what’s great about Apple products.
In our case the task is simpler because the articles themselves are the product. Perhaps another reason for our disagreement is that I think new ideas should spread by their own merit, not through people explicitly trying to convert other people. The LW worldview is based on the ideas of many people (Daniel Kahneman, Hugh Everett, E.T. Jaynes, Judea Pearl, Robin Hanson...), neither of whom ever tried to build communities of laymen for the express purpose of spreading their ideas in MLM style. It makes me cringe to even imagine this.
Actually, I agree with you. I only meant to point out that without some kind of deliberate promotion even really good ideas can be overlooked, but there are ways to do that without acting like Mormon missionaries.
But I don’t like being told what to do or telling others what to do, especially if it’s proselytizing. So I would have no place in a such a community.
What community organizational structure are you comfortable with? What tradeoffs will you accept between organizational structure and goal satisfaction?
Also it seems to me that when a product needs to be resold by its consumers, like religion or Amway, that means the product probably isn’t any good.
Does rationalists telling other people about rationality make rationality worse?
If Eliezer’s ideas about solving confusing problems actually helped, some of the many researchers who read LW would’ve found them useful and told us about it. And if the sequences were as useful in everyday life as they are well-written, a lot of people would have demonstrated that convincingly by now.
It seems to me, though, that the Mormon style of proselytizing is learning about prospective buyers, figuring out how to make their lives better, and then helping implement that. The benefit of that system is you have a knowledgeable person finding the highest-value tip for potential customers, which gets a lot more customers than having your catalog available at the public library and letting them find what suits them best. The question is not whether or not the tip is effective, but who pays to find that out.
What community organizational structure are you comfortable with? What tradeoffs will you accept between organizational structure and goal satisfaction?
I don’t have any goals that would be well served by joining an authoritarian volunteer community. All my goals are well served by my job or my informal social network.
I don’t have any goals that would be well served by joining an authoritarian volunteer community. All my goals are well served by my job or my informal social network.
Everything cousin_it says in this thread assume I said it as well.
All my goals are well served by my job or my informal social network.
Then why are you here at all? Or is LW included in the latter? (It’s actually at the ‘formal group’ end of my social experience, but I may be more abnormal than I think...)
Yeah, LW is included in the latter. As far as I can tell, it doesn’t yet require me to tell others what to do or be told what to do :-) For me it’s a place to hang out with smart people and talk about interesting things, like an intellectual nightclub.
I would think there is some fruitful discussion to be had about which of these techniques are considered valuable, and which would be potentially alienating. Are you objecting to ideas such as “using brief summaries to sell the ideas” as well as to the idea of rationalist communities organized that way?
I’d agree that I don’t want to be part of such a rationalist community, but the idea of using brevity to help market seems useful.
What techniques/methodologies do you use to divide techniques you approve of and those you disapprove? Stepping through this process with one of the techniques in the OP’s post would clear up much of why you would leave lesswrong if they became prominent.
I’m not interested in making this into a church-like group either. Some norms are useful (e.g. respond to words with words and never ever with bullets), while others (you must marry a rationalist? you must never do $list-of-sins or else?) would be abhorrent to me.
Helping people is a good goal to have. Regimenting their lives is not a goal I find appealing at all. I have enough trouble with my own life, why would I want to be in charge of other’s lives too? Ick!
I agree with the sentiment, here, but I also think it’s a bit of a knee-jerk reaction, and that with a bit of work we can come up with some norms that we’re already using that we’d like to spread. Rationalist taboo comes to mind, and actually updating based on evidence, and generally changing one’s behavior to match one’s beliefs. That last one seems to require a bit more give and take than just handing someone a set of rules, but I think that’s a good thing, and we could streamline the process by coming up with a list of common beliefs and behavioral implications thereof (cryo, for example).
Yes, I think it’s a case of codifying the norms that are already held. Taking care to watch out for verbal overshadowing and similar errors.
The fears expressed by cousin_it and Cayenne are quite reasonable ones to hold, since every cause wants to be a cult. Perhaps take care to facilitate schisms and stay on good terms with them, to avoid the rules ossifying into detached levers and hence lost purposes?
It’s not a knee-jerk reaction, but more like a visceral rejection. The thought of this community becoming something with the feel of the church I grew up in makes me feel sick, and if it happened I would walk away and never look back. This is certainly a bias, but I would still do it.
We need to have a clear and concise list of taboos, skills, and beliefs that we want to make into norms, and then the whole community has to talk them over and make sure that we really, really want to make them into our norms. If we’re going to start adopting practices from other groups, I believe this should be our highest priority.
It’s not a knee-jerk reaction, but more like a visceral rejection. The thought of this community becoming something with the feel of the church I grew up in makes me feel sick, and if it happened I would walk away and never look back. This is certainly a bias, but I would still do it.
I noticed your comment about being ex-Mormon after I wrote the grandparent. Even without that context, but especially with it, this is reasonable, and a good warning signal for us to look out for. Please try to give us a heads-up if we start getting close to that point, too, ok?
In a more general sense, I do think it’s important to keep the look-and-feel of any organizational structure we put together different from the general look-and-feel of churches. I see a few advantages to this, most obviously that it will avoid driving away non-rationalist atheists and it will help remove us from direct competition with churches so that people who ‘already have a religion, thanks’ don’t see that as a reason not to check us out.
We need to have a clear and concise list of taboos, skills, and beliefs that we want to make into norms, and then the whole community has to talk them over and make sure that we really, really want to make them into our norms. If we’re going to start adopting practices from other groups, I believe this should be our highest priority.
Absolutely.
Also note: None of the above is intended as an actual endorsement of any particular plan. We should figure out what we might do before we decide whether to do that thing, as far as I’m concerned, and we’re still in the first stage of that.
Well, to be slightly more clear, I am trans-gender. This is a sin in the LDS church, since the surgeries and hormones ‘desecrate my temple’ (temple == body). There is a limit to how much discrimination against ANY group I can stand before I leave, even if that group is ‘those people that want to kill us because we don’t believe in their god’.
At the same time, I really dislike the idea that I might be keeping a group from succeeding by giving negative input. I’m fairly likely to just withdraw without much fanfare if I decide that that is what’s happening, since I hate drama and making a scene about something like that would feel like an attempted hostage situation. Just no.
Since I believe in the ‘step-forward’ method of getting things done, I’ll start a discussion now to try to codify our norms.
Edit—please disregard this post, especially the last part. Empirical testing shows that I am not good at this kind of thing.
Some of it is difficult to pull apart into clear thought, but I’ll try.
I don’t want to have a list of groups I have to hate to belong. I don’t want to have someone trying to control my behavior by defining things as ‘sin’. I don’t want to be told ‘we love you, we just don’t like your actions’, when it’s clear that there is no love involved in any case. I don’t want to have to remember people and feel sorry that they’re part of a malignant memeplex, and that I can’t do anything to help them. I don’t want to dread going to a meet because I don’t fit in.
No, I really don’t like the LDS church. That’s probably never going to change, though I’ll try not to influence others’ decisions on the matter. I don’t hate the members, I just feel sad when I think of them, and of my ex-family.
I don’t hate the members, I just feel sad when I think of them, and of my ex-family.
That makes me sad too. I don’t have a particularly negative attitude towards religion (alll my personal interactions with religions and religious people have been pretty positive and haven’t included any of the aspects on your list) but I hear stories like yours about the incredibly toxic things people can do with their religions, and it depresses me, mostly because I don’t think it’s purely a symptom of people being religious. Otherwise, how could nearly all the religious people I’ve met be more accepting and less hypocritical about their daily life decisions than my atheist-by-default friends? It’s more a symptom of people being flawed humans, and that is depressing.
How much of what you don’t like about LDS is entangled with the organizational structure?
I don’t have a strong answer, just some concerns.
It may be that a lot of what’s wrong there is having a hard boundary between members and non-members. If so, rationalists may be able to beat that one by wanting people to be more rational, though there do seem to be some firm lines in this community, like being obligated to be a materialist.
I don’t want to have to remember people and feel sorry that they’re part of a malignant memeplex, and that I can’t do anything to help them.
You may be stuck with that one, especially in regards to cryonics, at least in the sense that you can’t do much to help them.
If so, rationalists may be able to beat that one by wanting people to be more rational, though there do seem to be some firm lines in this community, like being obligated to be a materialist.
I’m not sure what you mean by the word “materialist” in this context. Could you explain?
It would have to be something I would want to overcome. I came here because the sequences were fascinating to read, but I find more and more that I simply can’t consider myself to be rational in any meaningful way. I probably should try to overcome it, I suppose.
There’s a lot to learn from your posts and I appreciate your effort. But speaking for myself, if the LW community follows this route en masse, it’ll make me sad and eventually drive me away. I don’t want to be associated with anything that uses such techniques to spread.
I think that you are responding to the post at too low a level of abstraction.
One of the pleasures of reading Isaac Asimov’s Foundation is the scene in which Harry Seldon demonstrates the power of Psychohistory by designing an organisation, a variation of the Womens’s Institute, that grows and grows and grows. (And one of the shocks of re-reading Foundation is that the scene isn’t actually in that book. Where is it?). Ones intuition is that there are laws governing the dynamics of society and the rise and fall of empires. Can we discern enough of those laws to make sure that rationalism flourishes?
calcsam’s post contains much food for thought, and I envy his plain, simple prose style. Hence my praise.
Reading between the lines to detect and reject a suggestion that we turn Less Wrong into a church along the line of Latter-day Saints is a mistake. Food for thought should be digested not puked up.
Some rationalists come unstuck by becoming addicted to alcohol. Do we want a no-drinking rule, like the Latter-day Saints have? I don’t think we should even be asking the question. I don’t think it is helpful to draw parallels so closely. But we don’t have to just drop the issue.
We are aware of over-confidence bias. Perhaps that is related to alcoholism. It is no secret that alcohol is can be dangerously addictive. Any-one who lives in a big city sees the down and outs living on the street. And yet the problem of alcoholism self-limits at a fairly high level, as though people can see the danger and are over-confident of their own ability to avoid it.
It would be cool if rationalists could win in the sense of the rationalist community having a low rate of alcoholism. We are not interested in trying to do that by having a no-drinking rule, but that doesn’t mean we are not interested in trying by other means.
Suppose, for the sake of argument, that over-confidence bias (I can handle it, it won’t happen to me) is part of the cause of alcoholism. The means of combating alcoholism that align with our values is to find ways of bridging the gap between an academic understanding (that people in general are over-confident) and a personal understanding (that maybe I need to cut back my drinking because I am over-confident about being able to handle it.) I don’t think any-one feels threatened by a community norm of helping each other to bridge the academic/personal gap.
Another example is the Latter-day Saints rule against coffee. Not for us, obviously. On the other hand we are into self-experimentation. Try it and see. Nullius in verbia. That makes us a bit different. Most people who try giving up coffee to see if it makes their own life better face ribbing from their friends. The rationalist community could be more supportive than that. So we can look at calcsam’s post and be inspired to build a community around our own values and see how others, with different values, go about it.
It’s the short story “Snowball Effect” by Katherine MacLean. Collected in this anthology edited by Asimov.
Thanks Alan. You get my point. But even if rationalists don’t adopt any LDS norms—and I don’t expected them/us to (I’m hovering at the edge of the community at the moment) -- understanding that the framework here should be helpful.
Which techniques are you referring to? Techniques developed by the LDS, or techniques that have some other property?
I saw two concrete techniques in this post. “Help people implement positive changes through regular interaction” and “use brevity in your promotional materials.” I can see problems with each of them, but I cannot see why those problems make them negative overall.
For the first, you might argue that you want Less Wrong to only comprise self-starters. I would direct you to the posts about akrasia, specifically the ones which detail how social influence can cut down on akrasia.
For the second, you might argue that we only want people with the high IQs and available free time who can get through the Sequences as they are. While the first might be desirable, I’m unsure about the second- Are the Sequences really the shortest they could possibly be? Should we really be attracting the people who are willing to read tens of thousands of words before getting results, instead of proving our positive effects to others before asking them to commit?
My complaint isn’t that the proposed meme-spreading techniques lack effectiveness. I agree that they’re likely to be effective. My complaint is that I avoid people and communities that use such techniques, so if LW starts using them, I’ll start avoiding LW.
My biggest concern is that simply spreading the memes will be counterproductive if they are not spread properly (partial understanding would be a huge concern). If everyone is just guessing the teacher’s password, we will have probably done more damage than good.
I too have reservations about this material. But, I suspect that your recoiling and mine might stem from the representativeness heuristic—that anything associated with religion or its propagation techniques is Dark. I have a lot of negative associations there, and I’m betting many here do. However, religion’s propagation techniques are unquestionably powerful, and we should be able to learn from them.
To counteract this bias somewhat, imagine having some system—I don’t know the details yet, and neither do you—that would easily introduce the core concepts of rationality to anyone interested, and would make it easy to adopt those personal practices that one found positive or useful. Would this be a good thing?
I think so, yes, and clearly so—if improved decision-making, easier willful action, and clearer analysis were already widespread, we’d all live with fewer of other people’s bad decisions. Certainly, the clarity I’ve learned here has helped me; I’m willing to bet it’d help others as well.
If spreading rationality—or, at least, making rationality more palatably available—is a good thing, then we should as a community figure out what works to do that. If certain specific meme-spreading techniques are Dark or noxious, then we should identify what’s wrong in them, and see if we can eliminate them without making the technique wholly ineffective.
So, can you identify what parts of those techniques are noxious to you?
The OP’s previous post described a model of rationalist communities where you have “distillers” and “organizers” telling people to do stuff, some of which will be proselytizing. But I don’t like being told what to do or telling others what to do, especially if it’s proselytizing. So I would have no place in a such a community.
Also it seems to me that when a product needs to be resold by its consumers, like religion or Amway, that means the product probably isn’t any good. Imagine Steve Jobs using MLM to sell the iPhone! If Eliezer’s ideas about solving confusing problems actually helped, some of the many researchers who read LW would’ve found them useful and told us about it. And if the sequences were as useful in everyday life as they are well-written, a lot of people would have demonstrated that convincingly by now. In either case we would have an iPhone situation and would beat customers off with a stick, not struggle to attract them.
ETA: this comment is a joint reply to Vaniver, XFrequentist, fiddlemath and Davorak, because their questions were quite similar :-)
Okay, but also imagine Steve Jobs trying to sell the original iPod or iMac (before Apple’s huge rebound in popularity) with no TV ads, billboards, posters, product placements, press releases, slogans, over-hyped conferences, or presence in retail stores; just a website with a bunch of extremely long articles explaining what’s great about Apple products.
In our case the task is simpler because the articles themselves are the product. Perhaps another reason for our disagreement is that I think new ideas should spread by their own merit, not through people explicitly trying to convert other people. The LW worldview is based on the ideas of many people (Daniel Kahneman, Hugh Everett, E.T. Jaynes, Judea Pearl, Robin Hanson...), neither of whom ever tried to build communities of laymen for the express purpose of spreading their ideas in MLM style. It makes me cringe to even imagine this.
Actually, I agree with you. I only meant to point out that without some kind of deliberate promotion even really good ideas can be overlooked, but there are ways to do that without acting like Mormon missionaries.
This is very similar to how Magic: the Gathering gets spread; most players learned how to play from someone else.
What community organizational structure are you comfortable with? What tradeoffs will you accept between organizational structure and goal satisfaction?
Does rationalists telling other people about rationality make rationality worse?
It seems to me, though, that the Mormon style of proselytizing is learning about prospective buyers, figuring out how to make their lives better, and then helping implement that. The benefit of that system is you have a knowledgeable person finding the highest-value tip for potential customers, which gets a lot more customers than having your catalog available at the public library and letting them find what suits them best. The question is not whether or not the tip is effective, but who pays to find that out.
I don’t have any goals that would be well served by joining an authoritarian volunteer community. All my goals are well served by my job or my informal social network.
Everything cousin_it says in this thread assume I said it as well.
Then why are you here at all? Or is LW included in the latter? (It’s actually at the ‘formal group’ end of my social experience, but I may be more abnormal than I think...)
Yeah, LW is included in the latter. As far as I can tell, it doesn’t yet require me to tell others what to do or be told what to do :-) For me it’s a place to hang out with smart people and talk about interesting things, like an intellectual nightclub.
One that doesn’t have bouncers at the door to prevent guys coming in unless they bring chicks with them, to keep the balance...
I would think there is some fruitful discussion to be had about which of these techniques are considered valuable, and which would be potentially alienating. Are you objecting to ideas such as “using brief summaries to sell the ideas” as well as to the idea of rationalist communities organized that way?
I’d agree that I don’t want to be part of such a rationalist community, but the idea of using brevity to help market seems useful.
Which specific techniques do you dislike?
What techniques/methodologies do you use to divide techniques you approve of and those you disapprove? Stepping through this process with one of the techniques in the OP’s post would clear up much of why you would leave lesswrong if they became prominent.
I’m not interested in making this into a church-like group either. Some norms are useful (e.g. respond to words with words and never ever with bullets), while others (you must marry a rationalist? you must never do $list-of-sins or else?) would be abhorrent to me.
Helping people is a good goal to have. Regimenting their lives is not a goal I find appealing at all. I have enough trouble with my own life, why would I want to be in charge of other’s lives too? Ick!
Edit—please disregard this post
I agree with the sentiment, here, but I also think it’s a bit of a knee-jerk reaction, and that with a bit of work we can come up with some norms that we’re already using that we’d like to spread. Rationalist taboo comes to mind, and actually updating based on evidence, and generally changing one’s behavior to match one’s beliefs. That last one seems to require a bit more give and take than just handing someone a set of rules, but I think that’s a good thing, and we could streamline the process by coming up with a list of common beliefs and behavioral implications thereof (cryo, for example).
Yes, I think it’s a case of codifying the norms that are already held. Taking care to watch out for verbal overshadowing and similar errors.
The fears expressed by cousin_it and Cayenne are quite reasonable ones to hold, since every cause wants to be a cult. Perhaps take care to facilitate schisms and stay on good terms with them, to avoid the rules ossifying into detached levers and hence lost purposes?
Not that examples spring to mind. Perhaps annual Mixed Rationalist Arts tournaments, to keep a reality check in play.
(Heck, I think that one’s a great first step, if we can work out what to compete on.)
It’s not a knee-jerk reaction, but more like a visceral rejection. The thought of this community becoming something with the feel of the church I grew up in makes me feel sick, and if it happened I would walk away and never look back. This is certainly a bias, but I would still do it.
We need to have a clear and concise list of taboos, skills, and beliefs that we want to make into norms, and then the whole community has to talk them over and make sure that we really, really want to make them into our norms. If we’re going to start adopting practices from other groups, I believe this should be our highest priority.
Edit—please disregard this, it’s needlessly prescriptive.
I noticed your comment about being ex-Mormon after I wrote the grandparent. Even without that context, but especially with it, this is reasonable, and a good warning signal for us to look out for. Please try to give us a heads-up if we start getting close to that point, too, ok?
In a more general sense, I do think it’s important to keep the look-and-feel of any organizational structure we put together different from the general look-and-feel of churches. I see a few advantages to this, most obviously that it will avoid driving away non-rationalist atheists and it will help remove us from direct competition with churches so that people who ‘already have a religion, thanks’ don’t see that as a reason not to check us out.
Absolutely.
Also note: None of the above is intended as an actual endorsement of any particular plan. We should figure out what we might do before we decide whether to do that thing, as far as I’m concerned, and we’re still in the first stage of that.
Well, to be slightly more clear, I am trans-gender. This is a sin in the LDS church, since the surgeries and hormones ‘desecrate my temple’ (temple == body). There is a limit to how much discrimination against ANY group I can stand before I leave, even if that group is ‘those people that want to kill us because we don’t believe in their god’.
At the same time, I really dislike the idea that I might be keeping a group from succeeding by giving negative input. I’m fairly likely to just withdraw without much fanfare if I decide that that is what’s happening, since I hate drama and making a scene about something like that would feel like an attempted hostage situation. Just no.
Since I believe in the ‘step-forward’ method of getting things done, I’ll start a discussion now to try to codify our norms.
Edit—please disregard this post, especially the last part. Empirical testing shows that I am not good at this kind of thing.
Could you expand on the things about LDS that you don’t want to see replicated among rationalists?
Some of it is difficult to pull apart into clear thought, but I’ll try.
I don’t want to have a list of groups I have to hate to belong. I don’t want to have someone trying to control my behavior by defining things as ‘sin’. I don’t want to be told ‘we love you, we just don’t like your actions’, when it’s clear that there is no love involved in any case. I don’t want to have to remember people and feel sorry that they’re part of a malignant memeplex, and that I can’t do anything to help them. I don’t want to dread going to a meet because I don’t fit in.
No, I really don’t like the LDS church. That’s probably never going to change, though I’ll try not to influence others’ decisions on the matter. I don’t hate the members, I just feel sad when I think of them, and of my ex-family.
Edit—please disregard this post
That makes me sad too. I don’t have a particularly negative attitude towards religion (alll my personal interactions with religions and religious people have been pretty positive and haven’t included any of the aspects on your list) but I hear stories like yours about the incredibly toxic things people can do with their religions, and it depresses me, mostly because I don’t think it’s purely a symptom of people being religious. Otherwise, how could nearly all the religious people I’ve met be more accepting and less hypocritical about their daily life decisions than my atheist-by-default friends? It’s more a symptom of people being flawed humans, and that is depressing.
How much of what you don’t like about LDS is entangled with the organizational structure?
I don’t have a strong answer, just some concerns.
It may be that a lot of what’s wrong there is having a hard boundary between members and non-members. If so, rationalists may be able to beat that one by wanting people to be more rational, though there do seem to be some firm lines in this community, like being obligated to be a materialist.
You may be stuck with that one, especially in regards to cryonics, at least in the sense that you can’t do much to help them.
I’m not sure what you mean by the word “materialist” in this context. Could you explain?
Materialist as in reductionist, as in Thou Art Physics not as in being materialistic.
Ok (sigh of relief). That’s what I thought but I’m not used to seeing the word used to mean ‘reductionist’.
We are all reductionist girls*, living in a reductionist world.
* For a sufficiently broad value of “girls”, or a sufficiently narrow value of “all”.
Not exactly. Strange as it sounds, there are non-reductive materialist philosophers.
It is hard to say.
I have no doubt that rationalists will prevail eventually, and I wish luck to the ones that try.
Edit—please disregard this post
Isn’t this the sort of thing you come here to overcome? Or am I just thinking of our sister site?
It would have to be something I would want to overcome. I came here because the sequences were fascinating to read, but I find more and more that I simply can’t consider myself to be rational in any meaningful way. I probably should try to overcome it, I suppose.