If the context loses the safety property, sing out of tune, miss the beat and do some negative association exercises. In other words I regard it as overtly cautious to fear a cult sensation before the community is even at a community level.
But for those of us that are risk-averse (which should be none of us, but probably is the majority): Do you know of any community building exercises that do not have a potential negative backlash?
[… or is our kind doomed to be one of a kind? insert ominous music of own choice]
First: Singing out of tune would be defecting on other people’s community building practices, which is what I feared I might be doing by posting my comment in the first place. If a context loses the safety property and I can’t fix the context, why on earth would I stick around clogging up other people’s attempts at semi-random socially bonding? (Its not like I’m a seven year old being dragged to church against my will.) If a context works for others but seems bad to me, I can just exit the context rather than doing something to passive aggressively thwart it...
The reason I’ve brought this up here is that this community is notionally aimed at not being crazy, and I like the idea of a community of non-crazy people, and want to help with that project. My understanding is that I’m commenting in a way that advances the deep interests of the community, rather than injecting noise. If I’m wrong, that’s worth knowing, but I don’t think I’m wrong here.
More directly… did you understand the metaphor from computer security I was suggesting? If someone roots your server then one option is to format the drive and rebuild from scratch (after patching the security hole). Another is to do some kind of complicated sifting to filter the new malware out of your previously trustably valuable system… using external tools to handle the newly untrusted content safely, because the system itself has become potentially deeply unstrustworthy. Rebuilding from modified backups is vastly preferable in terms of time and efficiency.
However, it is a tragic fact about our souls, that they are currently implemented in a single piece of lipid and protein which can neither be backed up, nor restored, nor significantly manipulated by a separately secured exoself. As near as I can tell, in practice, all humans are regularly being hacked and mostly erased over and over again each day, with a small amount of stuff that “seems good” saved in long term storage. But much of what we think of as “our declarative selves” is, in some sense, just half-broken viral leftovers, especially (if you’ll permit me to switch metaphors) if we don’t cultivate our minds they way we’d cultivate a garden: planting things that are good, making sure it gets plenty of sunshine, regularly eliminating weeds, and generally practicing good husbandry. Ultimately, if you hope to do very much of significance with your mind, it will take months or years of intentional practice, information foraging, environmental selection, etc.
If someone’s mind was already full of weeds then they could do much worse than to throw a bunch of random heirloom seeds from well cultivated minds into their own mind to see what happens. What have they got to lose? However, I suspect that my mind is less overrun with weeds than is normally the case, so I take a measure of care with it. It makes sense to me that some people here would be “seeking heirloom seeds” and some people here would be “careful mind gardeners”.
For myself at this time, I’m more interested in “mental weeds as an object of study” because sometimes they sometimes have interesting features (especially related to survival characteristics like transmissible robustness) that are worth experimentally crossing with other thoughts to see if the results are better than what I started with, but this process is much much less haphazard than engaging in ecstatic dancing with people I don’t know very well. If someone with a head full of weeds wanted to learn from me, it seems like teaching might be better than dancing :-P
Do you know of any community building exercises that do not have a potential negative backlash?
A community building exercise that doesn’t have a potential negative backlash would be one that induces justified trust in the benevolence and sanity of other members of the community, while revealing real expertise that can be shared or leveraged for community benefit. Such a process might eliminate people who didn’t meet both criteria (benevolence and sanity) on some level or another. Conditioning on that kind of thing happening first, then… um… sure, break out some ecstatic dancing maybe? Preferably in smallish groups full of thoughtful people with multiple weak cross-links to other people in similar groups?
But if you’re proposing a cultural process that accepts everyone, and gets everyone to believe whatever is in everyone else’s heads at the beginning, that would trigger one of my heuristic detectors for mental malware. A novel meme-package that included content that induced such practices would probably spread faster than otherwise while picking up a bunch of parasitic elements in the process… to the detriment of the hosts.
I just lost a long response, because I was naive enough not to check if the “More Help” link in formatting was an in-tab link. It was. Hence a short answer (my self-allowed free-wheeling time is almost up)
First of all. Thank you for your more fulfilling answer.
First admission: In the bright light of hindsight I see that my reply was unnecessarily snide.
Second admission: Yes, I actually saw your first as being slightly noisy. Perhaps because the post on “Why Our Kind Can’t Cooperate” was so fresh in my mind. Your post fit very well into the self-sabotaging conducted by rationalists attempting communities that I perceived Eliezer to have described in that post.
Now I see that of course the interjection is valid. I just think our opinions differ on following points:
(1). The effectiveness of dancing and singing. Like you I’ve gone through quite a lot of years of mental gardening (around 7). With my current weed-out techniques, I do not think that the proposed exercises have an effect I couldn’t effectively undermine with ½-1 hour worth of auto-hypnosis. Hence my cost-benefit says (potentially) low cost and probable high benefit (low transaction cost of knowledge between me and rational-striving people who have tested approaches to subjects, or gained knowledge about subjects, I’m curious about, but have yet to explore myself).
(2). How profound the effect is. I’m obviously not a(n internet) network expert or I wouldn’t just have lost my entire post, but I wouldn’t liken dancing and singing together as root access. Nor as:
a cultural process that accepts everyone, and gets everyone to believe whatever is in everyone else’s heads at the beginning
More like opening a few ports perhaps (or allowing more bandwidth? - again I’m not nearly as tech-savvy as I have been, which means a lot less than most LW-members).
(3). Teaching creates more of a power division than a community feeling. Learning/exploring a new subject together, on the other hand, can be a quite powerful bond creation mechanism. My deepest bond of friendship has grown through learning a wide array of skills together and sharing insights on the way to the attainment of said skills.
(4). Your proposed ritual strikes me as being way more cultish than that of the post. The process mentioned strikes me as being very close to an initiation ritual. Furthermore: benevolence criteria is dubious: that means that we should agree on an ethical code (or at least points), which I’m not sure we do.
(5a). I do not personally consider it a minus to feel connected to strangers. Quite the opposite; my ethical position actually endorses that actively. Hence:
(5b). I’m slightly saddened by you likening a strong unity feeling to a parasitic disease.
PS. I tried reading the article on smallish groups (my best social structure for learning), but it was unfortunately a paid article and I’m not currently enjoying free access to the publication. If you have a way of enlightening me that does not require 35$ for me upfront, I’ll be more than willing to check it out.
PPS. When I format to use lines, is it normal that the formatting resets every number to one? IE: ” 1“ ” 2” became ” 1“ and ” 1”. I didn’t in the sandbox, and I didn’t immediately find something about it in the guide (and hence ran out of patience).
PS. I tried reading the article on smallish groups (my best social structure for learning), but it was unfortunately a paid article and I’m not currently enjoying free access to the publication. If you have a way of enlightening me that does not require 35$ for me upfront, I’ll be more than willing to check it out.
If the context loses the safety property, sing out of tune, miss the beat and do some negative association exercises. In other words I regard it as overtly cautious to fear a cult sensation before the community is even at a community level.
But for those of us that are risk-averse (which should be none of us, but probably is the majority): Do you know of any community building exercises that do not have a potential negative backlash?
[… or is our kind doomed to be one of a kind? insert ominous music of own choice]
First: Singing out of tune would be defecting on other people’s community building practices, which is what I feared I might be doing by posting my comment in the first place. If a context loses the safety property and I can’t fix the context, why on earth would I stick around clogging up other people’s attempts at semi-random socially bonding? (Its not like I’m a seven year old being dragged to church against my will.) If a context works for others but seems bad to me, I can just exit the context rather than doing something to passive aggressively thwart it...
The reason I’ve brought this up here is that this community is notionally aimed at not being crazy, and I like the idea of a community of non-crazy people, and want to help with that project. My understanding is that I’m commenting in a way that advances the deep interests of the community, rather than injecting noise. If I’m wrong, that’s worth knowing, but I don’t think I’m wrong here.
More directly… did you understand the metaphor from computer security I was suggesting? If someone roots your server then one option is to format the drive and rebuild from scratch (after patching the security hole). Another is to do some kind of complicated sifting to filter the new malware out of your previously trustably valuable system… using external tools to handle the newly untrusted content safely, because the system itself has become potentially deeply unstrustworthy. Rebuilding from modified backups is vastly preferable in terms of time and efficiency.
However, it is a tragic fact about our souls, that they are currently implemented in a single piece of lipid and protein which can neither be backed up, nor restored, nor significantly manipulated by a separately secured exoself. As near as I can tell, in practice, all humans are regularly being hacked and mostly erased over and over again each day, with a small amount of stuff that “seems good” saved in long term storage. But much of what we think of as “our declarative selves” is, in some sense, just half-broken viral leftovers, especially (if you’ll permit me to switch metaphors) if we don’t cultivate our minds they way we’d cultivate a garden: planting things that are good, making sure it gets plenty of sunshine, regularly eliminating weeds, and generally practicing good husbandry. Ultimately, if you hope to do very much of significance with your mind, it will take months or years of intentional practice, information foraging, environmental selection, etc.
If someone’s mind was already full of weeds then they could do much worse than to throw a bunch of random heirloom seeds from well cultivated minds into their own mind to see what happens. What have they got to lose? However, I suspect that my mind is less overrun with weeds than is normally the case, so I take a measure of care with it. It makes sense to me that some people here would be “seeking heirloom seeds” and some people here would be “careful mind gardeners”.
For myself at this time, I’m more interested in “mental weeds as an object of study” because sometimes they sometimes have interesting features (especially related to survival characteristics like transmissible robustness) that are worth experimentally crossing with other thoughts to see if the results are better than what I started with, but this process is much much less haphazard than engaging in ecstatic dancing with people I don’t know very well. If someone with a head full of weeds wanted to learn from me, it seems like teaching might be better than dancing :-P
A community building exercise that doesn’t have a potential negative backlash would be one that induces justified trust in the benevolence and sanity of other members of the community, while revealing real expertise that can be shared or leveraged for community benefit. Such a process might eliminate people who didn’t meet both criteria (benevolence and sanity) on some level or another. Conditioning on that kind of thing happening first, then… um… sure, break out some ecstatic dancing maybe? Preferably in smallish groups full of thoughtful people with multiple weak cross-links to other people in similar groups?
But if you’re proposing a cultural process that accepts everyone, and gets everyone to believe whatever is in everyone else’s heads at the beginning, that would trigger one of my heuristic detectors for mental malware. A novel meme-package that included content that induced such practices would probably spread faster than otherwise while picking up a bunch of parasitic elements in the process… to the detriment of the hosts.
I just lost a long response, because I was naive enough not to check if the “More Help” link in formatting was an in-tab link. It was. Hence a short answer (my self-allowed free-wheeling time is almost up)
First of all. Thank you for your more fulfilling answer.
First admission: In the bright light of hindsight I see that my reply was unnecessarily snide.
Second admission: Yes, I actually saw your first as being slightly noisy. Perhaps because the post on “Why Our Kind Can’t Cooperate” was so fresh in my mind. Your post fit very well into the self-sabotaging conducted by rationalists attempting communities that I perceived Eliezer to have described in that post.
Now I see that of course the interjection is valid. I just think our opinions differ on following points:
(1). The effectiveness of dancing and singing. Like you I’ve gone through quite a lot of years of mental gardening (around 7). With my current weed-out techniques, I do not think that the proposed exercises have an effect I couldn’t effectively undermine with ½-1 hour worth of auto-hypnosis. Hence my cost-benefit says (potentially) low cost and probable high benefit (low transaction cost of knowledge between me and rational-striving people who have tested approaches to subjects, or gained knowledge about subjects, I’m curious about, but have yet to explore myself).
(2). How profound the effect is. I’m obviously not a(n internet) network expert or I wouldn’t just have lost my entire post, but I wouldn’t liken dancing and singing together as root access. Nor as:
More like opening a few ports perhaps (or allowing more bandwidth? - again I’m not nearly as tech-savvy as I have been, which means a lot less than most LW-members).
(3). Teaching creates more of a power division than a community feeling. Learning/exploring a new subject together, on the other hand, can be a quite powerful bond creation mechanism. My deepest bond of friendship has grown through learning a wide array of skills together and sharing insights on the way to the attainment of said skills.
(4). Your proposed ritual strikes me as being way more cultish than that of the post. The process mentioned strikes me as being very close to an initiation ritual. Furthermore: benevolence criteria is dubious: that means that we should agree on an ethical code (or at least points), which I’m not sure we do.
(5a). I do not personally consider it a minus to feel connected to strangers. Quite the opposite; my ethical position actually endorses that actively. Hence:
(5b). I’m slightly saddened by you likening a strong unity feeling to a parasitic disease.
PS. I tried reading the article on smallish groups (my best social structure for learning), but it was unfortunately a paid article and I’m not currently enjoying free access to the publication. If you have a way of enlightening me that does not require 35$ for me upfront, I’ll be more than willing to check it out.
PPS. When I format to use lines, is it normal that the formatting resets every number to one? IE: ” 1“ ” 2” became ” 1“ and ” 1”. I didn’t in the sandbox, and I didn’t immediately find something about it in the guide (and hence ran out of patience).
Here’s a free link for the small groups article
Thank you!!! I know it’s been almost three years, but I’ve just discovered LessWrong (and my account) and highly appreciate your help.
I look forward to reading the article.