On how I see the issue with other people, I’d like to draw a caricature of how I see the world when I look at it with my dark gloomy glasses (which evolved into a long brainstorm that I only recommend you read after posting your own opinion about modes of living):
The world is a collection of an enormous amount of people who need love and attention. Unfortunately, everyone has a mental hierarchy of people in their minds and wants attention from the people who are on top of themselves in their hierarchy. Luckily each hierarchy is different though there are strong correlations. Sometimes a pair will hold each other as higher and thus interact for a while.
People spend a lot of time trying to figure out how to be interesting and engaging to the people they want to be around though mostly they do it at an unconscious level. Many do almost all they do so that others will find them prestigious and worthy of their love and attention.
Which is funny, because one of the things you need to do as you move up the partial ordering of those hierarchies, is either really pushing people away, or pretending you don’t need love and attention. Having a blaze attitude of I don’t care. Or, more likely in the world of people I hang around; having a “I don’t have time to talk unless it’s super important and will save the world within 21 hours” attitude.
Facebook made all that kind of peculiar. People post pictures of the few times in which they feel socially authorized to be in company of friends, and usually say nothing about the hours and hours they spend learning the skills that gave them friends, or simply were alone. Here is where living alone strikes. Every now and then people cry out for help in desperation. It is usually when they are alone and can no longer stand this loopsided ape logic of only looking up social hierarchies (and god forbid we had matching hierarchies, that would be the end of the world) .
My general impression is that loneliness is going to be one of the grand problems of the 21st century. More only children, architecture designed for living alone, big cities where it is physically hard to get to friends, different conceptions of what a family should be like, and easy web access to people who are awesome at some skill you like, but live half a world away from you are all factors contributing to this claim.
Once I was just the nerd chubby boy with glasses sitting at the edge of the classroom. A wallflower with some math intuition.
I’ve grown in a very lucky environment, and now I have people that look up to me, quote me on their Skype phrase, feel nervous when talking to me or even avoid talking to me because my time is precious and I direct a small organization. An NGO that accepts my suggestions (I guess) mostly because of my past deeds, since no one is being paid.
So I’ve been on both sides of at least some person’s feeling of prestige, and desire for friendship, for co-working, for attention, love, etc…
Thus I’ve been on both sides, I still am on both sides for different people. And it doesn’t feel that different. For random interactions on my day to day life, seems to me I am bound to only see as emotionally and socially worthy a small subset of interactions no matter how much prestige I earn, lose or keep.
So… the secret seems to be (and I hope it is obvious that I’m thinking while I write, and I have no certainty of what I’m saying) to have many interactions of the kind “it’s a given”. If you are already in love, then that interaction is a given. If you work at adjacent desks, that is a given. Most importantly for the topic, if you live in the same house, it is a given. There is no social tension, no need to consult your mental model of hierarchies. You are interacting with that person because you live together which is completely legit. You don’t need to be proving yourself and testing them all the time.
Seth Godin gave a TED talk in 2008 saying that the internet has resurrected a mode of living that had not been practiced ever since the inception of cities with Oikos (family houses), the Tribe. I agree with that, and I think it is time for architecture, and people, to catch up.
Work in the 80′s used to be interact for 6 hours, read, think focused for 2 hours, then go home and rest because finally you can be with yourself. Now work is 8 hours in front of a computer. Sometimes in your cubicle, sometimes home. But emotionally alone nevertheless. The trend has reversed. It is time to get back home so you can finally see some real squishy people and talk about plans and goals.
People should live in Goal Tribes, aka intentional communities. Effective Altruists and eco-friendly folk around the world have realized that, and I wonder to what extent can that success case be generalized.
People probably need two kinds of communities—let’s call them “feelings-oriented community” and “outcome-oriented community” (or more simply “home” and “work”, but that has some misleading connotations).
A “feelings-oriented community” is a community of people who meet because they enjoy being together and feel safe with each other. The examples are a functional family, a church group, friends meeting in a pub, etc.
An “outcome-oriented community” is a community that has an explicit goal, and people genuinely contribute to making that goal happen. The examples are a business company, an NGO, a Toastmasters meetup, etc.
The important part is what really happens inside the members’ heads, not what they pretend to do. For example, you could have an NGO with twelve members, where two of them want to have the work done, but the remaining ten only come to socialize. Of course, even those ten will verbally support the explicit goals of the organization, but they will be much more relaxed about timing, care less about verifying the outcomes, etc. For them, the explicit goals are merely a source of identity and a pretext to meet people professing similar values; for them, the community is the real goal. If they had a magic button which would instantly solve the problem, making the organization obviously obsolete, they wouldn’t push it. The people who are serious about the goal would love to see it completed as soon as possible, so they can move to some other goals. (I have seen a similar tension in a few organizations, and the usual solution seems to be the serious members forming an “organization within an organization”, keeping the other ones around them for social and other purposes.)
As an evolutionary just-so story, we have a tribe composed of many different people, and within the tribe we have a hunters group, containing the best hunters. Members of the tribe are required to follow the norms of the tribe. Hunters must be efficient in their jobs. But hunters don’t become a separate tribe… they go hunting for a while, and then return back to their original tribe. The tribe membership is for life, or at least for a long time; it provides safety and fulfills the emotional needs. Each hunting expedition is a short-termed event; it requires skills and determination. If a hunter breaks his legs, he can no longer be a hunter; but he still remains a member of his tribe.
I think a healthy way of living should be modelled like this; on two layers. To have a larger tribe based on shared values (rationality and altruism), and within this tribe a few working groups, both long-term (MIRI, CFAR) and short-term (organizers of the next meetup). Of course it could be a few overlapping tribes (the rationalists, the altruists), but the important thing is that you keep your social network even if you stop participating in some specific project—otherwise we get either cultish pressure (you have to remain hard-working on our project even if you no longer feel so great about it, or you lose your whole social network) or inefficiency (people remain formally members of the project, but lately barely any work gets done, and the more active ones are warned not to rock the boat). Joining or leaving a project should not be motivated or punished socially.
Perhaps acknowledging this difference is one of the differences between a standard religion and a cult. The cult is a society and a workforce in one: if you stop working, your former friends throw you overboard, because now you are just a burden to them. For a less connotationally sensitive example, consider an average job: you may think about your colleagues as your friends, but if you leave the job, how many of them will you keep regular contact with? In contast with this, a regular church just asks you to come to sunday prayers, gives you some keywords and a few relatively simple rules. If this level of participation is ideal for you, welcome, brother or sister! And if you want more, feel free to join some higher-commitment group within the church. You choose the level of your participation, and you can change it during your life. For a non-religious example, in a good neighborhood you could have similar relations with your neighbors: some of you have the same jobs, some of you have the same hobby, some of you participate on a local short-term project; but you know each other and you will remain neighbors for years.
Actually, something like this is already naturally happening with LW: there are people who merely procrastinate on the LW website, and there are people who join some of the organizations mentioned here. The only problem is that the virtual community of LW readers is… virtual. Unless you live near each other, you can’t have a beer together every week, can’t go together for a trip or a vacation, can’t together create an environment for your children where they will naturally internalize your values, can’t help each other solve their random problems.
It would be great to have a LW village, where some people would work on effective altruism, others would work on building artificial intelligence, yet others would develop a rationality curriculum, and some would be too busy with their personal issues to do any of this now… but everyone would know that this is a village where good and sane people live, where cool things happen, and whichever of these good and real goals I will choose to prioritize, it’s still a community where I belong. [EDIT: Actually, it would be great to have a village where 5% or 10% of people would be the LW community. Connotationally, it’s not about being away from other people, but about being with my people.]
Do you have any evidence for your claim that people need these two layers? As far as I can tell this is just something for which you can make up a plausible sounding story.
there are people who merely procrastinate on the LW website, and there are people who join some of the organizations mentioned here
There is a (multidimensional) continuum of people on LW. It is not as black and white as you make it out to be.
Do you have any evidence for your claim that people need these two layers?
My observation of a few different NGOs and the catholic church. The catholics even have a name for it, although I am not 100% sure my interpretation is correct. From wikipedia:
In many Christian religions, “modality” refers to the structure and organization of the local or universal church, composed of pastors or priests. By contrast, parachurch organizations are termed sodalities. These include missionary organizations and Christian charities or fraternities not linked to specific churches. Some theologians would include denominations, schools of theology, and other multi-congregational efforts in the sodality category. Catholic sodalities can include orders, monasteries, and convents.
Here my translation would be “modality” = the whole church (community-oriented), “sodality” = a working group within the church (task-oriented).
The tension between “people who come to socialize” and “people who want to have work done” in some organizations seems pretty obvious to me. And these goals are not completely opposite; the task-oriented people usually also love to socialize. It’s just a difference between people who work towards the goal, and use the social environment to relax afterwards; and people who come there mostly for socializing—the latter provide a social support for the former, but that’s pretty much their only contribution towards the professed goals.
A person can be task-oriented in one group and community-oriented in another one. I can imagine a person running a successful business, who once in a week comes to a chess club without playing any chess there, merely talking with other chess players about what a great game chess is and then having some talk about their lives. I am not criticizing the person; just saying that if too many people in the chess club will treat it this way, it will become a chess club only in a name, and the most active chess players will start meeting somewhere else. Or at least there will be one corner in the club where the people are really playing, and the rest of the club will be there for the talkers.
I guess during many LW meetups there are also people who want to do some rationality exercises, talk about scientific books they read, do some projects, increase the sanity waterline, et cetera… and then there are people who come because they feel good in the company of smart and sane people. Both of those are legitimate goals; it’s just not the same goal, and it is good to be aware of it. -- Otherwise the people who want to “become stronger” become frustrated by the inactivity of the others; and the people who come there because they enjoy the company of the smart and sane people become frustrated that someone is always bothering them to do something, when in fact they prefer it as it is.
(From memory), Idris Shah said that Sufis wouldn’t teach anyone who didn’t have a social life, so that teaching wouldn’t be (would be at less risk for?) diluted by the need for socializing.
That’s also a great excuse for rejecting low-status people, mwahahaha! :D
(Connotationally: The mere fact that this filters out low-status people doesn’t make it a suboptimal strategy for the explicit goal of not diluting the teaching.)
The sort of Sufism Shah was talking about was a secret society. They weren’t and aren’t subject to the ADA. If they want to reject low-status people, they don’t need excuses.
This being said, a lot of low-status people do have social lives.
On how I see the issue with other people, I’d like to draw a caricature of how I see the world when I look at it with my dark gloomy glasses (which evolved into a long brainstorm that I only recommend you read after posting your own opinion about modes of living):
The world is a collection of an enormous amount of people who need love and attention. Unfortunately, everyone has a mental hierarchy of people in their minds and wants attention from the people who are on top of themselves in their hierarchy. Luckily each hierarchy is different though there are strong correlations. Sometimes a pair will hold each other as higher and thus interact for a while.
People spend a lot of time trying to figure out how to be interesting and engaging to the people they want to be around though mostly they do it at an unconscious level. Many do almost all they do so that others will find them prestigious and worthy of their love and attention.
Which is funny, because one of the things you need to do as you move up the partial ordering of those hierarchies, is either really pushing people away, or pretending you don’t need love and attention. Having a blaze attitude of I don’t care. Or, more likely in the world of people I hang around; having a “I don’t have time to talk unless it’s super important and will save the world within 21 hours” attitude.
Facebook made all that kind of peculiar. People post pictures of the few times in which they feel socially authorized to be in company of friends, and usually say nothing about the hours and hours they spend learning the skills that gave them friends, or simply were alone. Here is where living alone strikes. Every now and then people cry out for help in desperation. It is usually when they are alone and can no longer stand this loopsided ape logic of only looking up social hierarchies (and god forbid we had matching hierarchies, that would be the end of the world) .
My general impression is that loneliness is going to be one of the grand problems of the 21st century. More only children, architecture designed for living alone, big cities where it is physically hard to get to friends, different conceptions of what a family should be like, and easy web access to people who are awesome at some skill you like, but live half a world away from you are all factors contributing to this claim.
Once I was just the nerd chubby boy with glasses sitting at the edge of the classroom. A wallflower with some math intuition. I’ve grown in a very lucky environment, and now I have people that look up to me, quote me on their Skype phrase, feel nervous when talking to me or even avoid talking to me because my time is precious and I direct a small organization. An NGO that accepts my suggestions (I guess) mostly because of my past deeds, since no one is being paid.
So I’ve been on both sides of at least some person’s feeling of prestige, and desire for friendship, for co-working, for attention, love, etc…
Thus I’ve been on both sides, I still am on both sides for different people. And it doesn’t feel that different. For random interactions on my day to day life, seems to me I am bound to only see as emotionally and socially worthy a small subset of interactions no matter how much prestige I earn, lose or keep.
So… the secret seems to be (and I hope it is obvious that I’m thinking while I write, and I have no certainty of what I’m saying) to have many interactions of the kind “it’s a given”. If you are already in love, then that interaction is a given. If you work at adjacent desks, that is a given. Most importantly for the topic, if you live in the same house, it is a given. There is no social tension, no need to consult your mental model of hierarchies. You are interacting with that person because you live together which is completely legit. You don’t need to be proving yourself and testing them all the time.
Seth Godin gave a TED talk in 2008 saying that the internet has resurrected a mode of living that had not been practiced ever since the inception of cities with Oikos (family houses), the Tribe. I agree with that, and I think it is time for architecture, and people, to catch up.
Work in the 80′s used to be interact for 6 hours, read, think focused for 2 hours, then go home and rest because finally you can be with yourself. Now work is 8 hours in front of a computer. Sometimes in your cubicle, sometimes home. But emotionally alone nevertheless. The trend has reversed. It is time to get back home so you can finally see some real squishy people and talk about plans and goals.
People should live in Goal Tribes, aka intentional communities. Effective Altruists and eco-friendly folk around the world have realized that, and I wonder to what extent can that success case be generalized.
People probably need two kinds of communities—let’s call them “feelings-oriented community” and “outcome-oriented community” (or more simply “home” and “work”, but that has some misleading connotations).
A “feelings-oriented community” is a community of people who meet because they enjoy being together and feel safe with each other. The examples are a functional family, a church group, friends meeting in a pub, etc.
An “outcome-oriented community” is a community that has an explicit goal, and people genuinely contribute to making that goal happen. The examples are a business company, an NGO, a Toastmasters meetup, etc.
The important part is what really happens inside the members’ heads, not what they pretend to do. For example, you could have an NGO with twelve members, where two of them want to have the work done, but the remaining ten only come to socialize. Of course, even those ten will verbally support the explicit goals of the organization, but they will be much more relaxed about timing, care less about verifying the outcomes, etc. For them, the explicit goals are merely a source of identity and a pretext to meet people professing similar values; for them, the community is the real goal. If they had a magic button which would instantly solve the problem, making the organization obviously obsolete, they wouldn’t push it. The people who are serious about the goal would love to see it completed as soon as possible, so they can move to some other goals. (I have seen a similar tension in a few organizations, and the usual solution seems to be the serious members forming an “organization within an organization”, keeping the other ones around them for social and other purposes.)
As an evolutionary just-so story, we have a tribe composed of many different people, and within the tribe we have a hunters group, containing the best hunters. Members of the tribe are required to follow the norms of the tribe. Hunters must be efficient in their jobs. But hunters don’t become a separate tribe… they go hunting for a while, and then return back to their original tribe. The tribe membership is for life, or at least for a long time; it provides safety and fulfills the emotional needs. Each hunting expedition is a short-termed event; it requires skills and determination. If a hunter breaks his legs, he can no longer be a hunter; but he still remains a member of his tribe.
I think a healthy way of living should be modelled like this; on two layers. To have a larger tribe based on shared values (rationality and altruism), and within this tribe a few working groups, both long-term (MIRI, CFAR) and short-term (organizers of the next meetup). Of course it could be a few overlapping tribes (the rationalists, the altruists), but the important thing is that you keep your social network even if you stop participating in some specific project—otherwise we get either cultish pressure (you have to remain hard-working on our project even if you no longer feel so great about it, or you lose your whole social network) or inefficiency (people remain formally members of the project, but lately barely any work gets done, and the more active ones are warned not to rock the boat). Joining or leaving a project should not be motivated or punished socially.
Perhaps acknowledging this difference is one of the differences between a standard religion and a cult. The cult is a society and a workforce in one: if you stop working, your former friends throw you overboard, because now you are just a burden to them. For a less connotationally sensitive example, consider an average job: you may think about your colleagues as your friends, but if you leave the job, how many of them will you keep regular contact with? In contast with this, a regular church just asks you to come to sunday prayers, gives you some keywords and a few relatively simple rules. If this level of participation is ideal for you, welcome, brother or sister! And if you want more, feel free to join some higher-commitment group within the church. You choose the level of your participation, and you can change it during your life. For a non-religious example, in a good neighborhood you could have similar relations with your neighbors: some of you have the same jobs, some of you have the same hobby, some of you participate on a local short-term project; but you know each other and you will remain neighbors for years.
Actually, something like this is already naturally happening with LW: there are people who merely procrastinate on the LW website, and there are people who join some of the organizations mentioned here. The only problem is that the virtual community of LW readers is… virtual. Unless you live near each other, you can’t have a beer together every week, can’t go together for a trip or a vacation, can’t together create an environment for your children where they will naturally internalize your values, can’t help each other solve their random problems.
It would be great to have a LW village, where some people would work on effective altruism, others would work on building artificial intelligence, yet others would develop a rationality curriculum, and some would be too busy with their personal issues to do any of this now… but everyone would know that this is a village where good and sane people live, where cool things happen, and whichever of these good and real goals I will choose to prioritize, it’s still a community where I belong. [EDIT: Actually, it would be great to have a village where 5% or 10% of people would be the LW community. Connotationally, it’s not about being away from other people, but about being with my people.]
Berkeley is probably the closest equivalent of that village.
Also thanks for your long and interesting reflections.
Do you have any evidence for your claim that people need these two layers? As far as I can tell this is just something for which you can make up a plausible sounding story.
There is a (multidimensional) continuum of people on LW. It is not as black and white as you make it out to be.
My observation of a few different NGOs and the catholic church. The catholics even have a name for it, although I am not 100% sure my interpretation is correct. From wikipedia:
Here my translation would be “modality” = the whole church (community-oriented), “sodality” = a working group within the church (task-oriented).
The tension between “people who come to socialize” and “people who want to have work done” in some organizations seems pretty obvious to me. And these goals are not completely opposite; the task-oriented people usually also love to socialize. It’s just a difference between people who work towards the goal, and use the social environment to relax afterwards; and people who come there mostly for socializing—the latter provide a social support for the former, but that’s pretty much their only contribution towards the professed goals.
A person can be task-oriented in one group and community-oriented in another one. I can imagine a person running a successful business, who once in a week comes to a chess club without playing any chess there, merely talking with other chess players about what a great game chess is and then having some talk about their lives. I am not criticizing the person; just saying that if too many people in the chess club will treat it this way, it will become a chess club only in a name, and the most active chess players will start meeting somewhere else. Or at least there will be one corner in the club where the people are really playing, and the rest of the club will be there for the talkers.
I guess during many LW meetups there are also people who want to do some rationality exercises, talk about scientific books they read, do some projects, increase the sanity waterline, et cetera… and then there are people who come because they feel good in the company of smart and sane people. Both of those are legitimate goals; it’s just not the same goal, and it is good to be aware of it. -- Otherwise the people who want to “become stronger” become frustrated by the inactivity of the others; and the people who come there because they enjoy the company of the smart and sane people become frustrated that someone is always bothering them to do something, when in fact they prefer it as it is.
(From memory), Idris Shah said that Sufis wouldn’t teach anyone who didn’t have a social life, so that teaching wouldn’t be (would be at less risk for?) diluted by the need for socializing.
That’s also a great excuse for rejecting low-status people, mwahahaha! :D
(Connotationally: The mere fact that this filters out low-status people doesn’t make it a suboptimal strategy for the explicit goal of not diluting the teaching.)
The sort of Sufism Shah was talking about was a secret society. They weren’t and aren’t subject to the ADA. If they want to reject low-status people, they don’t need excuses.
This being said, a lot of low-status people do have social lives.