Personally, I think cohorts happen automatically, and LW is “yet another cohort” and if we want to be part of a movement with inter-generational significance then maybe we should pause to consider why we think we should be “the first generation” in a movement that lasts forever...
In this vein, I appreciate previous places and groups like:
The SL4 mailing list (where Eliezer had the experiences that inspired the Sequences).
Several generations of early hard science fiction authors and fans.
Quite a few libertarians probably?
Also a lot of heretics. Luther and Newton were both nutcases...
Etc. Etc. (I’m surely forgetting stuff.)
If I was going to name the entire thing, I think I might call it “Outsider Science” (taking a cue from “Outsider Art” and contrasting it with “Vannevarian Science”).
So if you wanted to be so Hufflepuff that you sacrificed the whole group on the altar of being social (rather than just sacrificing yourself for the group) I’d argue that it would be a natural progression to work on reconnecting, resuscitating, archiving, and generally paying attention to these older places and communities, and putting yourself in service to their long term goals.
The hard thing here is that the diagnostic criteria looking backwards seems to be having a certain mindset towards physical reality and being a kind of a cultural orphan at the same time. The standoffishness and founding a tiny little institutes is part of what this movement seems to do by default?
Thus, projecting forward, you would predict that new instances of “the outsider science movement” would form on their own, start their own thing, and reject the notion of intellectual parentage, as much as we (the hypothetical intellectual parents) try to bring them into the loose confederation of previous attempts at self organized scientific research aiming at eternal intellectual challenges.
A lot of the future people you’d be trying to bring into the fold might very well prefer to struggle on alone.
Arguably, Vanevarian Science (with government credentialed universities doing government funded research) is already doing what you would evolve into anyway, and has succeeded so far and so thoroughly that its “highest mid level hierarchs” have become members of the deep government of the world? So maybe the right thing to do is just let all the various orphans struggle on by themselves, and just go try to get a job at NSF while retaining fond feelings for the strugglers?
So my guess is that Bacon’s Effecting Of All Things Possible has run for a long while now, and maybe “the orphans” who might have belonged to the high church version (but somehow never connected with the central culture) were never really noticed until the internet came along and then could start to find each other and form little clumps and clusters.
So maybe the most Hufflepuff thing possible would be to somehow be encourage a larger internet culture that finds and welcomes these autonomous orphan clusters, while also extending an olive branch to the high church “Heirs of Bacon” who exist in the deep government, and see if there is some way to establish a state of communion between the main tree and all the little saplings :-)
I agree that “cohorts happen automatically”, and the organisations that prevent this usually care explicitly about the next generations, whether we are talking about the Scout movement, religious groups, or academia. Ignoring this would be detrimental to the rationalist movement in long term.
Understandably, most of us have negative connotations associated with “spreading the word”. It is yet another “motte and bailey” situation, where on some level it’s true that increasing the number of people who e.g. read Less Wrong is not our terminal value, that gaining followers is almost orthogonal to being ‘less wrong’, and that trying to be attractive for too many people could dilute the message; but on the other hand, it can easily become reversed stupidity, something like people refusing to eat food just because Hitler did that.
There are two basic ways how can rationality movement could disappear from the world. One is gradual shrinking: people individually deciding that e.g. Pascal’s wager actually makes sense, or that making their political faction win is more important than getting statistics and logic right, or otherwise trade rationality for something more appealing. The other is gradually becoming a group of old farts, whose debates are gradually reduced to talking over and over again about the things that happened decades ago. -- Where do we see ourselves, as a group, 50 years from now? (Conditional on Singularity not happening, humanity not going extinct, etc., or course.)
Of course, if we are not willing to enter a “loose confederation” with the previous generations, we should not expect a different approach from the next generations. Telling them to “read the Sequences” would be like telling us to “read Science and Sanity”; maybe one in a hundred would do, but nothing would change as a result, anyway.
Seems like two things need to be done, probably in this order:
1) Agree on a larger definition of “confederation of reason”, “scions of Bacon”, or whatever we decide to call it. Yes, this will be difficult, it goes against our nitpicking instinct, and it is going to rub many people the wrong way.
2) Make a strategic effort to recruit people, a lot of them (not just a few mathematical prodigies), into the “confederation of reason”. This could mean joining what other organisations are already doing, instead of reinventing the wheel. This again goes against our instincts.
I expect that many rationalists will be not able to overcome their insticts on these matters, so we should not expect a wide consensus here. Instead, a few people who like this idea should just create a team, and do it. Which is how generally things get done.
Personally, I think cohorts happen automatically, and LW is “yet another cohort” and if we want to be part of a movement with inter-generational significance then maybe we should pause to consider why we think we should be “the first generation” in a movement that lasts forever...
In this vein, I appreciate previous places and groups like:
The SL4 mailing list (where Eliezer had the experiences that inspired the Sequences).
The Extropians
Robin Hanson (who was an Extropian back in the day, co-blogged with Eliezer, and needs no link)
Daniel Hillis and the Long Now Foundation
Eric Drexler and the Foresight Institute
Ralph Merkle and the Institute for Molecular Manufacturing
Mike Darwin
Ettinger and Bedford and the whole early cryonics movement.
Several generations of early hard science fiction authors and fans.
Quite a few libertarians probably?
Also a lot of heretics. Luther and Newton were both nutcases...
Etc. Etc. (I’m surely forgetting stuff.)
If I was going to name the entire thing, I think I might call it “Outsider Science” (taking a cue from “Outsider Art” and contrasting it with “Vannevarian Science”).
So if you wanted to be so Hufflepuff that you sacrificed the whole group on the altar of being social (rather than just sacrificing yourself for the group) I’d argue that it would be a natural progression to work on reconnecting, resuscitating, archiving, and generally paying attention to these older places and communities, and putting yourself in service to their long term goals.
The hard thing here is that the diagnostic criteria looking backwards seems to be having a certain mindset towards physical reality and being a kind of a cultural orphan at the same time. The standoffishness and founding a tiny little institutes is part of what this movement seems to do by default?
Thus, projecting forward, you would predict that new instances of “the outsider science movement” would form on their own, start their own thing, and reject the notion of intellectual parentage, as much as we (the hypothetical intellectual parents) try to bring them into the loose confederation of previous attempts at self organized scientific research aiming at eternal intellectual challenges.
A lot of the future people you’d be trying to bring into the fold might very well prefer to struggle on alone.
Arguably, Vanevarian Science (with government credentialed universities doing government funded research) is already doing what you would evolve into anyway, and has succeeded so far and so thoroughly that its “highest mid level hierarchs” have become members of the deep government of the world? So maybe the right thing to do is just let all the various orphans struggle on by themselves, and just go try to get a job at NSF while retaining fond feelings for the strugglers?
So my guess is that Bacon’s Effecting Of All Things Possible has run for a long while now, and maybe “the orphans” who might have belonged to the high church version (but somehow never connected with the central culture) were never really noticed until the internet came along and then could start to find each other and form little clumps and clusters.
So maybe the most Hufflepuff thing possible would be to somehow be encourage a larger internet culture that finds and welcomes these autonomous orphan clusters, while also extending an olive branch to the high church “Heirs of Bacon” who exist in the deep government, and see if there is some way to establish a state of communion between the main tree and all the little saplings :-)
I agree that “cohorts happen automatically”, and the organisations that prevent this usually care explicitly about the next generations, whether we are talking about the Scout movement, religious groups, or academia. Ignoring this would be detrimental to the rationalist movement in long term.
Understandably, most of us have negative connotations associated with “spreading the word”. It is yet another “motte and bailey” situation, where on some level it’s true that increasing the number of people who e.g. read Less Wrong is not our terminal value, that gaining followers is almost orthogonal to being ‘less wrong’, and that trying to be attractive for too many people could dilute the message; but on the other hand, it can easily become reversed stupidity, something like people refusing to eat food just because Hitler did that.
There are two basic ways how can rationality movement could disappear from the world. One is gradual shrinking: people individually deciding that e.g. Pascal’s wager actually makes sense, or that making their political faction win is more important than getting statistics and logic right, or otherwise trade rationality for something more appealing. The other is gradually becoming a group of old farts, whose debates are gradually reduced to talking over and over again about the things that happened decades ago. -- Where do we see ourselves, as a group, 50 years from now? (Conditional on Singularity not happening, humanity not going extinct, etc., or course.)
Of course, if we are not willing to enter a “loose confederation” with the previous generations, we should not expect a different approach from the next generations. Telling them to “read the Sequences” would be like telling us to “read Science and Sanity”; maybe one in a hundred would do, but nothing would change as a result, anyway.
Seems like two things need to be done, probably in this order:
1) Agree on a larger definition of “confederation of reason”, “scions of Bacon”, or whatever we decide to call it. Yes, this will be difficult, it goes against our nitpicking instinct, and it is going to rub many people the wrong way.
2) Make a strategic effort to recruit people, a lot of them (not just a few mathematical prodigies), into the “confederation of reason”. This could mean joining what other organisations are already doing, instead of reinventing the wheel. This again goes against our instincts.
I expect that many rationalists will be not able to overcome their insticts on these matters, so we should not expect a wide consensus here. Instead, a few people who like this idea should just create a team, and do it. Which is how generally things get done.