One of my more eccentric positions has long been that we ought to be a tribe.
Oof, is this really an eccentric position? FWIW, I am extremely convinced that the rationalist community ought to be a tribe, and one of the biggest updates I made at the CFAR reunion was seeing what felt to me like evidence that we were becoming more functional along tribey directions that I really wanted.
In short, because I think tribes are the natural environments in which humans live, and that ignoring that fact produces unhappy and dysfunctional humans.
There’s a logic gap there. You are assuming that rationalists don’t have pre-existing tribes, that they won’t be in any tribe if they are not in the rationalist tribe. And you are assuming that rationalists need to be in a rationality tribe in order to be rational … arguably, it works the other way..tribalism enhances group think bias, and so lowers the rationality level, on the whole.
Oof, is this really an eccentric position? FWIW, I am extremely convinced that the rationalist community ought to be a tribe, and one of the biggest updates I made at the CFAR reunion was seeing what felt to me like evidence that we were becoming more functional along tribey directions that I really wanted.
Why?
In short, because I think tribes are the natural environments in which humans live, and that ignoring that fact produces unhappy and dysfunctional humans.
There’s a logic gap there. You are assuming that rationalists don’t have pre-existing tribes, that they won’t be in any tribe if they are not in the rationalist tribe. And you are assuming that rationalists need to be in a rationality tribe in order to be rational … arguably, it works the other way..tribalism enhances group think bias, and so lowers the rationality level, on the whole.