Learning a new set of norms/standards and sticking to them in the right contexts is often not easy. Getting a bunch of other people to choose to do so seems likely to be harder. (Although that’s just my immediate sense of how it is; it may be completely wrong…)
Yeah, definitely correct that this is a necessary subskill and there are some groups of people where this is really hard because the meta-norms are all about freethinking individuality (and the rationality community comes from roots that often have that).
But I think enforcing norms for the first time mostly just (“just”) requires you to be generally good public speaking (the sort of commanding tone you need to get people to do anything, normswise or otherwise, which I think is an important skill for meetup organizers to acquire no matter what, and if you’ve got the “comfortable talking in front of people” thing down the “get people do things” part I think is easy-ish)
Including in a meetup announcement “this meetup will be following X norms”, and then saying it again at the beginning of the meetup usually works fairly well in my experience.
Yeah, definitely correct that this is a necessary subskill and there are some groups of people where this is really hard because the meta-norms are all about freethinking individuality (and the rationality community comes from roots that often have that).
But I think enforcing norms for the first time mostly just (“just”) requires you to be generally good public speaking (the sort of commanding tone you need to get people to do anything, normswise or otherwise, which I think is an important skill for meetup organizers to acquire no matter what, and if you’ve got the “comfortable talking in front of people” thing down the “get people do things” part I think is easy-ish)
Including in a meetup announcement “this meetup will be following X norms”, and then saying it again at the beginning of the meetup usually works fairly well in my experience.