It’s common for these societies to require some sort of initiatory ordeal.
We had one. It was called “reading the frickin’ Sequences”. It was on every tongue, in every thread. Ah, it was a golden age! Then men and elves grew soft.
I’m working on it, but you have to admit they are extremely long. They’re several years of content and not all of them are easy to internalize.
I understand that joining (and more importantly becoming accepted in) an (online) community should require some effort. You don’t join /r/HPMOR without having read at least a couple of chapters. You don’t join a Magic: The Gathering or Dungeons and Dragons forum without at least knowing a little bit about the games.
But more importantly, I think, isn’t the effort that preceded joining the community. It’s the commitment to improvement that matters. When you join a baseball team, you’re not judged on your ability to throw or hit a ball, you’re judged on your willingness to come to trainings and observe the games your team plays.
So having the Sequences as (part of) a rite of initiation is okay, but there would need to be some system of support to help newcomers through them.
Fair point. I don’t actually think that the move away from that was a bad one, though; reading the Sequences is at the very least a bit too easy to paint as indoctrination. It also selects for people with large amounts of free time, which might not be what we’re looking for; the people most likely to read 500,000 words are, or are indistinguishable from, bored teenagers.
(Disclaimer: I have in fact read the frickin’ Sequences.)
the people most likely to read 500,000 words are, or are indistinguishable from, bored teenagers.
An average bored teenager spends a lot of time online, but not systematically reading texts about rationality. There are just too many alternatives, and many of them are hundred times more attractive to a random teenager. Making the choice to spend that time reading the Sequences instead of something else certainly means something.
I understand if people are too busy to read the Sequences. However, the more comments they write on LW, the smaller my understanding becomes. Could we have a community norm of expecting people to read 10 articles before they start contributing, and then 1 additional article for each 10 comments they write? Yeah, in real life it would be complicated to measure, but the idea is that if someone has enough time to chat on the internet, then they also have the time to read a part of the Sequences, they just prefer not to.
I think I agree with the general thrust of this, although I still think you’re underestimating the attractiveness of Sequences-like material to a certain type of teenager. When I was that age, I was reading political philosophy of about the same length and density and, er, somewhat lesser overall quality; the Sequences didn’t exist at the time, but if they had I expect they would have scratched that itch far more effectively. I am of course a sample space of one, but the survey results do seem to suggest that I’m not entirely wrong: we do skew awfully hard towards college-aged people and younger.
In any case, I’m not saying that reading the Sequences isn’t a good idea; if it wasn’t, I wouldn’t have stuck it out that far myself. I just don’t think it’s a particularly good thing to be targeting as part of the initiatory phase of someone’s communication with the LW community. Particularly the physical, person-to-person part of it, which is what I was mainly referring to.
Reading a body of ‘sacred texts’ (ahem) is not uncommon as part of the preparation of initiation rituals. What may be missing is some kind of examination of the competence of the ‘apprentice’.
We had one. It was called “reading the frickin’ Sequences”. It was on every tongue, in every thread. Ah, it was a golden age! Then men and elves grew soft.
I’m working on it, but you have to admit they are extremely long. They’re several years of content and not all of them are easy to internalize.
I understand that joining (and more importantly becoming accepted in) an (online) community should require some effort. You don’t join /r/HPMOR without having read at least a couple of chapters. You don’t join a Magic: The Gathering or Dungeons and Dragons forum without at least knowing a little bit about the games.
But more importantly, I think, isn’t the effort that preceded joining the community. It’s the commitment to improvement that matters. When you join a baseball team, you’re not judged on your ability to throw or hit a ball, you’re judged on your willingness to come to trainings and observe the games your team plays.
So having the Sequences as (part of) a rite of initiation is okay, but there would need to be some system of support to help newcomers through them.
Fair point. I don’t actually think that the move away from that was a bad one, though; reading the Sequences is at the very least a bit too easy to paint as indoctrination. It also selects for people with large amounts of free time, which might not be what we’re looking for; the people most likely to read 500,000 words are, or are indistinguishable from, bored teenagers.
(Disclaimer: I have in fact read the frickin’ Sequences.)
An average bored teenager spends a lot of time online, but not systematically reading texts about rationality. There are just too many alternatives, and many of them are hundred times more attractive to a random teenager. Making the choice to spend that time reading the Sequences instead of something else certainly means something.
I understand if people are too busy to read the Sequences. However, the more comments they write on LW, the smaller my understanding becomes. Could we have a community norm of expecting people to read 10 articles before they start contributing, and then 1 additional article for each 10 comments they write? Yeah, in real life it would be complicated to measure, but the idea is that if someone has enough time to chat on the internet, then they also have the time to read a part of the Sequences, they just prefer not to.
I think I agree with the general thrust of this, although I still think you’re underestimating the attractiveness of Sequences-like material to a certain type of teenager. When I was that age, I was reading political philosophy of about the same length and density and, er, somewhat lesser overall quality; the Sequences didn’t exist at the time, but if they had I expect they would have scratched that itch far more effectively. I am of course a sample space of one, but the survey results do seem to suggest that I’m not entirely wrong: we do skew awfully hard towards college-aged people and younger.
In any case, I’m not saying that reading the Sequences isn’t a good idea; if it wasn’t, I wouldn’t have stuck it out that far myself. I just don’t think it’s a particularly good thing to be targeting as part of the initiatory phase of someone’s communication with the LW community. Particularly the physical, person-to-person part of it, which is what I was mainly referring to.
Reading a body of ‘sacred texts’ (ahem) is not uncommon as part of the preparation of initiation rituals. What may be missing is some kind of examination of the competence of the ‘apprentice’.