This reminds me how the Amish Do Things, and some frustrations I generally have with my social environment, (and maybe also a nagging curiosity I had about Dragon Army, which I think specifically aimed to address this particular problem?).
A friend mentioned when he came back from MAPLE that the fairly strict rules about going to bed on time turned “stay up late” into a non-option, and he actually just went to sleep because the choices were “sleep” or “read.” I similarly have a sense that actually having an environment that really made “not exercise” not an option would really help me.
I know of (I think?) multiple group houses that have tried to implement morning meditation, which failed due to gradual erosion/entropy. I only know of Dragon Army implementing group exercise (and making some nontrivial bid to be an all-encompassing-social-environment that had a shot of succeeding in the particular the dimensions you describe here).
I’m not that optimistic about going to MAPLE to fix the exercise issue in particular (or the various other psychological issues) because I don’t expect to retain them after going elsewhere.
I’m also not that optimistic about replicating it elsewhere, because it seems like it requires some moving parts interlocking at once, that’s just hard to bootstrap.
What’s your sense of which pieces are loadbearing, here? Does it seem tractable to build either a grouphouse or org that tries to do any of this?
It feels tractable to me. I feel like there are lots of levers to play around with.
Pieces I suspect may be load-bearing:
Honest selection effects. This means sending accurate, honest messages, to attract people who are good fits and pass under the radar of those who aren’t. (With some flexibility at the edges, as some people might be on the fence / seem like not-fits but only on the surface; those people can run some cheap experiments, like visiting for a few days.)
There needs to be a bigger point to it all. I don’t think this can all just be for the sake of “my own health” or “I feel less stress with a schedule” or something like this. These personal motivations don’t stand up to enough pressure. At MAPLE, everything is ultimately for the sake of training awakening and leadership. You signed up in order to grow in these ways, and so you’re devoting yourself to the training. And more than that, the point of training is to become a person who can help others / do good things when you leave—someone who can be of benefit, be reliable, is trustworthy, is compassionate. You’ll sacrifice some optionality if there’s an inspiring, higher purpose to the sacrifice. If it only feels like “well I guess I could give up on some sleep in order to exercise because it’s good for me...?”, then it could often go either way. When there’s a higher purpose that’s bigger than me, there’s always a North Star to be following, even if I’m not always on track.
Reasonable, skillful leadership. This thing probably doesn’t work very well if decisions are all based on consensus or something. So you’d want to find at least a few pretty reliable, trustworthy, reasonable people to lead / hold the important roles. Power should be spread around, but it seems fine for there to be a “final say-so” person, who exercises end-of-the-line power, but does so infrequently. There are various ways to play with this. The important thing is having a few good leaders (maybe even just one? but this feels less robust to me), who people would be willing to follow, and they should divide roles between them in a sensible way. One person can be end-of-the-line decision-maker tie-breaker (probably the person with the Vision).
Using commitments wisely. If the leaders all have buy-in (because they put in the most effort, money, etc.), but the followers don’t, the thing will probably fall apart. Get commitments from people, preferably in writing. And then make sure commitments really mean something, in general. Include integrity in your list of virtues. Leaders should consistently demonstrate they care about commitments (big or small) and that when they themselves break commitments, they take that seriously. People should not break their commitments, but also they shouldn’t be shamed if they do. A broken commitment is like a death. It’s no one’s fault, but it’s also worth trying to prevent. Occasionally, it may be correct to break a commitment, but there should be an acknowledgement of its suboptimality (e.g. perhaps it should have been differently made originally, or never made).
Feedback culture. It should be welcome and encouraged and also normal to give and receive feedback from each other, daily. Ideal feedback should be kindly given, rather than given out of annoyance, superiority, disappointment, shaming, or guilting. Feedback is ideally received as a gift. It is OK to fail in giving/receiving feedback well, because people can give feedback on how you give/receive feedback. At MAPLE, it’s part of the written commitment that you will give/receive feedback. (Part of me suspects this works so well at MAPLE because of the meditation training, which helps people feel more equanimous and calms egoic reactivity. If meditation training is important for growing the skill of giving/receiving feedback easefully, that might be a major constraint.)
Financial viability. One thing about Dragon Army that I didn’t like was that Duncan seemed to be holding most of the financial burden, and his willingness and ability to provide financial support seemed cruxy to the thing staying afloat. Now I understand better that it’s possible to fundraise for projects like this and also apply for grants. My sense now is that if people don’t want to give you money for such a project, maybe it’s better to just not do it? On the other hand, if your project has visionary and trustworthy leadership—then you can probably find people interested in funding it, even if they’re not directly involved. If your project is inspiring and beneficial to others, you’ll probably find donors. I think it’s better not to rely on the residing community members as the only source of financial support. (Leverage seems to work this way?)
I do think this is probably the main bottleneck, actually. (I have a post-concept dangling in my to-do list that “the leadership bottleneck” is one of the key things facing the Village. (And, alas, also, the Mission. Competent people are rare and the world is big).
I feel very compelled by this! I would love to help figure out how to approach this bottleneck. I have some ideas.
My sense is that there are some useful funnels already in place that one could take advantage of for finding potential people, and there are effective, growth-y training programs one could also take advantage of. There are maybe bottlenecks in money + space in specific training programs + getting the right people to the right training programs.
The first one is something like “entry level leadership”, where you’re just getting people over the hump of “I can be a person who has agency and organizers/leads at all”. I don’t think growth-training-programs quite work here because people may not even think of themselves as potential leaders to train.
(In the case of Any Given Local Village, I think the deal is that the village needs to be organized such that it naturally causes people to incrementally gain leadership skills, organically as a part of being in the village)
The second would be “okay, though, we actually need people with particular competencies here – an understanding of How Humans Work as well as (potentially) some specific skills relating to whatever you’re leading people towards (i.e. parkour, programming, meditation, rationality).”
It has become really salient to me recently that good practice involves lots of prolific output in low-stakes throwaway contexts. Whereas a core piece of EA and rationalist mindsets is steering towards high-stakes things to work on, and treating your outputs as potentially very impactful and not to be thrown away. In my own mind “practice mindset” and “impact mindset” feel very directly in tension.
I have a feeling that something around this mindset difference is part of why world-saving orientation in a community might be correlated with inadequate opportunities for low-stakes leadership practice.
(recognizing that there’s definitely areas within the rationality community / memeset that reinforce fairly similar high-stakes-memes as the EA memeset. But my experience is that overall the rationality community doesn’t put nearly as pervasive pressure to be ‘impactful’ – there’s a lot more room for just exploring interesting ideas because they are neat, or whatnot)
Worth noting here that the Schedule at MAPLE is very conducive for creating these low-stakes contexts. In fact, inside the Schedule, you are always in such a context…
There is a world-saving mission at MAPLE, but at MAPLE, it does not define people’s worth or whether they deserve care / attention or whether they belong in the community. I think the issue with both the EA and rationalist community is that people’s “output” is too easily tied to their sense of worth. I could probably write many words on this phenomenon in the Bay community.
It is hard to convey in mere words what MAPLE has managed to do here. There is a clearer separation between “your current output level” and “your deserving-ness / worthiness as a human.” It was startling to experience this separation occurring on a visceral level within me. Now I’m much more grounded, self-confident, and less likely to take things personally, and this shift feels permanent and also ongoing.
I think growth-training programs actually do work for the former.
E.g. My CFAR workshop wasn’t something I decided to go to because I was thinking about training leadership. But it none-the-less helped unlock some of this “entry level leadership” thing. Much of the same happens with Circling and other workshops that help unblock people.
So far what seems to work here is training programs that do any kind of developmental training / leveling up. Ideally they work on you regardless of what stage you happen to be and just help propel you to the next stage.
Of course, not all the people who go through those programs end up interested in leadership, but this is probably fine, and I suspect trying to pre-screen for ‘leadership potential’ is a waste of effort, and you should just ride selection effects. (Similar to how people who emigrate correlate with having skill, resourcefulness, and gumption.)
This reminds me how the Amish Do Things, and some frustrations I generally have with my social environment, (and maybe also a nagging curiosity I had about Dragon Army, which I think specifically aimed to address this particular problem?).
A friend mentioned when he came back from MAPLE that the fairly strict rules about going to bed on time turned “stay up late” into a non-option, and he actually just went to sleep because the choices were “sleep” or “read.” I similarly have a sense that actually having an environment that really made “not exercise” not an option would really help me.
I know of (I think?) multiple group houses that have tried to implement morning meditation, which failed due to gradual erosion/entropy. I only know of Dragon Army implementing group exercise (and making some nontrivial bid to be an all-encompassing-social-environment that had a shot of succeeding in the particular the dimensions you describe here).
I’m not that optimistic about going to MAPLE to fix the exercise issue in particular (or the various other psychological issues) because I don’t expect to retain them after going elsewhere.
I’m also not that optimistic about replicating it elsewhere, because it seems like it requires some moving parts interlocking at once, that’s just hard to bootstrap.
What’s your sense of which pieces are loadbearing, here? Does it seem tractable to build either a grouphouse or org that tries to do any of this?
It feels tractable to me. I feel like there are lots of levers to play around with.
Pieces I suspect may be load-bearing:
Honest selection effects. This means sending accurate, honest messages, to attract people who are good fits and pass under the radar of those who aren’t. (With some flexibility at the edges, as some people might be on the fence / seem like not-fits but only on the surface; those people can run some cheap experiments, like visiting for a few days.)
There needs to be a bigger point to it all. I don’t think this can all just be for the sake of “my own health” or “I feel less stress with a schedule” or something like this. These personal motivations don’t stand up to enough pressure. At MAPLE, everything is ultimately for the sake of training awakening and leadership. You signed up in order to grow in these ways, and so you’re devoting yourself to the training. And more than that, the point of training is to become a person who can help others / do good things when you leave—someone who can be of benefit, be reliable, is trustworthy, is compassionate. You’ll sacrifice some optionality if there’s an inspiring, higher purpose to the sacrifice. If it only feels like “well I guess I could give up on some sleep in order to exercise because it’s good for me...?”, then it could often go either way. When there’s a higher purpose that’s bigger than me, there’s always a North Star to be following, even if I’m not always on track.
Reasonable, skillful leadership. This thing probably doesn’t work very well if decisions are all based on consensus or something. So you’d want to find at least a few pretty reliable, trustworthy, reasonable people to lead / hold the important roles. Power should be spread around, but it seems fine for there to be a “final say-so” person, who exercises end-of-the-line power, but does so infrequently. There are various ways to play with this. The important thing is having a few good leaders (maybe even just one? but this feels less robust to me), who people would be willing to follow, and they should divide roles between them in a sensible way. One person can be end-of-the-line decision-maker tie-breaker (probably the person with the Vision).
Using commitments wisely. If the leaders all have buy-in (because they put in the most effort, money, etc.), but the followers don’t, the thing will probably fall apart. Get commitments from people, preferably in writing. And then make sure commitments really mean something, in general. Include integrity in your list of virtues. Leaders should consistently demonstrate they care about commitments (big or small) and that when they themselves break commitments, they take that seriously. People should not break their commitments, but also they shouldn’t be shamed if they do. A broken commitment is like a death. It’s no one’s fault, but it’s also worth trying to prevent. Occasionally, it may be correct to break a commitment, but there should be an acknowledgement of its suboptimality (e.g. perhaps it should have been differently made originally, or never made).
Feedback culture. It should be welcome and encouraged and also normal to give and receive feedback from each other, daily. Ideal feedback should be kindly given, rather than given out of annoyance, superiority, disappointment, shaming, or guilting. Feedback is ideally received as a gift. It is OK to fail in giving/receiving feedback well, because people can give feedback on how you give/receive feedback. At MAPLE, it’s part of the written commitment that you will give/receive feedback. (Part of me suspects this works so well at MAPLE because of the meditation training, which helps people feel more equanimous and calms egoic reactivity. If meditation training is important for growing the skill of giving/receiving feedback easefully, that might be a major constraint.)
Financial viability. One thing about Dragon Army that I didn’t like was that Duncan seemed to be holding most of the financial burden, and his willingness and ability to provide financial support seemed cruxy to the thing staying afloat. Now I understand better that it’s possible to fundraise for projects like this and also apply for grants. My sense now is that if people don’t want to give you money for such a project, maybe it’s better to just not do it? On the other hand, if your project has visionary and trustworthy leadership—then you can probably find people interested in funding it, even if they’re not directly involved. If your project is inspiring and beneficial to others, you’ll probably find donors. I think it’s better not to rely on the residing community members as the only source of financial support. (Leverage seems to work this way?)
I do think this is probably the main bottleneck, actually. (I have a post-concept dangling in my to-do list that “the leadership bottleneck” is one of the key things facing the Village. (And, alas, also, the Mission. Competent people are rare and the world is big).
I feel very compelled by this! I would love to help figure out how to approach this bottleneck. I have some ideas.
My sense is that there are some useful funnels already in place that one could take advantage of for finding potential people, and there are effective, growth-y training programs one could also take advantage of. There are maybe bottlenecks in money + space in specific training programs + getting the right people to the right training programs.
I think there’s maybe two distinct bottlenecks:
The first one is something like “entry level leadership”, where you’re just getting people over the hump of “I can be a person who has agency and organizers/leads at all”. I don’t think growth-training-programs quite work here because people may not even think of themselves as potential leaders to train.
(In the case of Any Given Local Village, I think the deal is that the village needs to be organized such that it naturally causes people to incrementally gain leadership skills, organically as a part of being in the village)
The second would be “okay, though, we actually need people with particular competencies here – an understanding of How Humans Work as well as (potentially) some specific skills relating to whatever you’re leading people towards (i.e. parkour, programming, meditation, rationality).”
It has become really salient to me recently that good practice involves lots of prolific output in low-stakes throwaway contexts. Whereas a core piece of EA and rationalist mindsets is steering towards high-stakes things to work on, and treating your outputs as potentially very impactful and not to be thrown away. In my own mind “practice mindset” and “impact mindset” feel very directly in tension.
I have a feeling that something around this mindset difference is part of why world-saving orientation in a community might be correlated with inadequate opportunities for low-stakes leadership practice.
This is actually exactly why I think the rationality community / memeset makes more sense as entry level EA than the EA community
(recognizing that there’s definitely areas within the rationality community / memeset that reinforce fairly similar high-stakes-memes as the EA memeset. But my experience is that overall the rationality community doesn’t put nearly as pervasive pressure to be ‘impactful’ – there’s a lot more room for just exploring interesting ideas because they are neat, or whatnot)
Worth noting here that the Schedule at MAPLE is very conducive for creating these low-stakes contexts. In fact, inside the Schedule, you are always in such a context…
There is a world-saving mission at MAPLE, but at MAPLE, it does not define people’s worth or whether they deserve care / attention or whether they belong in the community. I think the issue with both the EA and rationalist community is that people’s “output” is too easily tied to their sense of worth. I could probably write many words on this phenomenon in the Bay community.
It is hard to convey in mere words what MAPLE has managed to do here. There is a clearer separation between “your current output level” and “your deserving-ness / worthiness as a human.” It was startling to experience this separation occurring on a visceral level within me. Now I’m much more grounded, self-confident, and less likely to take things personally, and this shift feels permanent and also ongoing.
I think this is a very important point, and that anyone trying to build community around a mission should pay attention to it.
+1
Good to train in a gym before you fight.
I think growth-training programs actually do work for the former.
E.g. My CFAR workshop wasn’t something I decided to go to because I was thinking about training leadership. But it none-the-less helped unlock some of this “entry level leadership” thing. Much of the same happens with Circling and other workshops that help unblock people.
So far what seems to work here is training programs that do any kind of developmental training / leveling up. Ideally they work on you regardless of what stage you happen to be and just help propel you to the next stage.
Of course, not all the people who go through those programs end up interested in leadership, but this is probably fine, and I suspect trying to pre-screen for ‘leadership potential’ is a waste of effort, and you should just ride selection effects. (Similar to how people who emigrate correlate with having skill, resourcefulness, and gumption.)