I’ve interacted a bunch recently with members of a group of about 2 million people who recite a 245-word creed twice daily, and assemble weekly to read from an 80,000 word text such that the whole text gets read annually. This is nowhere near a complete accounting of engagement with verbal canon within the group. Each of these practices is preceded and followed by an additional standardized text of substantial length, and many people study full-time a much larger canonical text claiming to interpret the core text.
They also engage in behavior patterns that, while they don’t necessarily reflect detailed engagement by each person with the content of the core text, do reflect a lot of fine-grained responsiveness to the larger interpretive canon.
You might be closer for what can be done very quickly (within a single generation) under current conditions. But a political movement plenty of people are newly worried about which likely has thousands of members has a 14-word creed.
Nod. Social pressure and/or organizational efforts to read a particular thing together (esp. in public where everyone can see that everyone else is reading) does seem like a thing that would work.
It comes with drawbacks such as “if it turns out you need to change the 80,000 word text because you picked the wrong text or need to amend it, I expect there to be a lot of political drama surrounding that, and the process by which people building momentum towards changing it probably would be subject to the bandwidth limits I’m pointing to [edit: unless the organization has specifically built in tools to alleviate that]”
(Reminder that I specifically said “all numbers are made up and/or sketchily sourced”. I’m pointing to order of magnitude. I did consider naming this blogpost “you have about five words” or “you have less than seven words”. I think it was a somewhat ironic failure of mine that I went with “you have four words” since it degrades less gracefully than “you have about five words.”)
14 is still half an order of magnitude above 5, and I don’t think neo-Nazis are particularly close to the most complex coordination thousands of people can achieve with a standardized set of words.
I suppose, but, again, “all numbers are made up” was the first sentence in this post, and half an order of magnitude feels within bounds of “the general point of the essay holds up.”
I also don’t currently know of anyone writing on LessWrong or EA forum who should have reason to believe they are as coordinated as the neo-Nazis are here. (See elsethread comment on my take on the state of EA coordination, which was the motivation for this post).
(In Romeo’s terms, the neo-nazis are also using a social tech with unfolding complexity, where their actual coordinated action is “recite the pledge every day”, which lets them them encode additional information. But to get this you need to spend your initial coordinated action on that unfolding action)
You’re massively underestimating the upper bound.
I’ve interacted a bunch recently with members of a group of about 2 million people who recite a 245-word creed twice daily, and assemble weekly to read from an 80,000 word text such that the whole text gets read annually. This is nowhere near a complete accounting of engagement with verbal canon within the group. Each of these practices is preceded and followed by an additional standardized text of substantial length, and many people study full-time a much larger canonical text claiming to interpret the core text.
They also engage in behavior patterns that, while they don’t necessarily reflect detailed engagement by each person with the content of the core text, do reflect a lot of fine-grained responsiveness to the larger interpretive canon.
You might be closer for what can be done very quickly (within a single generation) under current conditions. But a political movement plenty of people are newly worried about which likely has thousands of members has a 14-word creed.
Nod. Social pressure and/or organizational efforts to read a particular thing together (esp. in public where everyone can see that everyone else is reading) does seem like a thing that would work.
It comes with drawbacks such as “if it turns out you need to change the 80,000 word text because you picked the wrong text or need to amend it, I expect there to be a lot of political drama surrounding that, and the process by which people building momentum towards changing it probably would be subject to the bandwidth limits I’m pointing to [edit: unless the organization has specifically built in tools to alleviate that]”
(Reminder that I specifically said “all numbers are made up and/or sketchily sourced”. I’m pointing to order of magnitude. I did consider naming this blogpost “you have about five words” or “you have less than seven words”. I think it was a somewhat ironic failure of mine that I went with “you have four words” since it degrades less gracefully than “you have about five words.”)
14 is still half an order of magnitude above 5, and I don’t think neo-Nazis are particularly close to the most complex coordination thousands of people can achieve with a standardized set of words.
I suppose, but, again, “all numbers are made up” was the first sentence in this post, and half an order of magnitude feels within bounds of “the general point of the essay holds up.”
I also don’t currently know of anyone writing on LessWrong or EA forum who should have reason to believe they are as coordinated as the neo-Nazis are here. (See elsethread comment on my take on the state of EA coordination, which was the motivation for this post).
(In Romeo’s terms, the neo-nazis are also using a social tech with unfolding complexity, where their actual coordinated action is “recite the pledge every day”, which lets them them encode additional information. But to get this you need to spend your initial coordinated action on that unfolding action)
Are you talking about Judaism?