My goal is to create a rationalist community. A place to meet other people with similar values and “win” together. I want to optimize my life (not just my online quantum physics debating experience). I am thinking strategically about an offline experience here.
Eliezer wrote about how a rationalist community might need to defend itself from an attack of barbarians. In my opinion, sociopaths are even greater danger, because they are more difficult to detect, and nerds have a lot of blind spots here. We focus on dealing with forces of nature. But in the social world, we must also deal with people, and this is our archetypal weakness.
The typical nerd strategy for solving conflicts is to run away and hide, and create a community of social outcasts where everything is tolerated, and the whole group is safe more or less because it has so low status that typical bullies rather avoid it. But at the moment we start “winning”, this protective shield is over, and we do not have any other coping strategy. Just like being rich makes you an attractive target for thieves, being successful (and I hope rationalist groups will become successful in near future) makes your community a target for people who love to exploit people and get power. And all they need to get inside is to be intelligent and memorize a few LW keywords. Once your group becomes successful, I believe it’s just a question of time. (Even a partial success, which for you is merely a first step along a very long way, can already do this.) That will happen much sooner than any “barbarians” would consider you a serious danger.
(I don’t want to speak about politics here, but I believe that many political conflicts are so bad because most of the sides have sociopaths as their leaders. It’s not just the “affective death spirals”, although they also play a large role. But there are people in important positions who don’t think about “how to make the world a better place for humans”, but rather “how could I most benefit from this conflict”. And the conflict often continues and grows because that happens to be the way for those people to profit most. And this seems to happen on all sides, in all movements, as soon as there is some power to be gained. Including movements that ostensibly are against the concept of power. So the other way to ask my question would be: How can a rationalist community get more power, without becoming dominated by people who are willing to sacrifice anything for power? How to have a self-improving Friendly human community? If we manage to have a community that doesn’t immediately fall apart, or doesn’t become merely a debate club, this seems to me like the next obvious risk.)
I don’t want to speak about politics here, but I believe that many political conflicts are so bad because most of the sides have sociopaths as their leaders.
How do you come to that conclusion? Simply because you don’t agree with their actions? Otherwise are there trained psychologists who argue that position in detail and try to determine how politicians score on the Hare scale?
If I tried to estimate a sociopathy scale from 0 to 10, in my life I have personally met one person who scores 10, two people somewhere around 2, and most nasty people were somewhere between 0 and 1, usually closer to 0.
I hope it illustrates that my mental model has separate buckets for “people I suspect to be sociopaths” and “people I disagree with”.
Diagnosing mental illness based on the kind of second hand information you have about politicians isn’t a trivial effort. Especially if you lack the background in psychology.
Why is this important?
My goal is to create a rationalist community. A place to meet other people with similar values and “win” together. I want to optimize my life (not just my online quantum physics debating experience). I am thinking strategically about an offline experience here.
Eliezer wrote about how a rationalist community might need to defend itself from an attack of barbarians. In my opinion, sociopaths are even greater danger, because they are more difficult to detect, and nerds have a lot of blind spots here. We focus on dealing with forces of nature. But in the social world, we must also deal with people, and this is our archetypal weakness.
The typical nerd strategy for solving conflicts is to run away and hide, and create a community of social outcasts where everything is tolerated, and the whole group is safe more or less because it has so low status that typical bullies rather avoid it. But at the moment we start “winning”, this protective shield is over, and we do not have any other coping strategy. Just like being rich makes you an attractive target for thieves, being successful (and I hope rationalist groups will become successful in near future) makes your community a target for people who love to exploit people and get power. And all they need to get inside is to be intelligent and memorize a few LW keywords. Once your group becomes successful, I believe it’s just a question of time. (Even a partial success, which for you is merely a first step along a very long way, can already do this.) That will happen much sooner than any “barbarians” would consider you a serious danger.
(I don’t want to speak about politics here, but I believe that many political conflicts are so bad because most of the sides have sociopaths as their leaders. It’s not just the “affective death spirals”, although they also play a large role. But there are people in important positions who don’t think about “how to make the world a better place for humans”, but rather “how could I most benefit from this conflict”. And the conflict often continues and grows because that happens to be the way for those people to profit most. And this seems to happen on all sides, in all movements, as soon as there is some power to be gained. Including movements that ostensibly are against the concept of power. So the other way to ask my question would be: How can a rationalist community get more power, without becoming dominated by people who are willing to sacrifice anything for power? How to have a self-improving Friendly human community? If we manage to have a community that doesn’t immediately fall apart, or doesn’t become merely a debate club, this seems to me like the next obvious risk.)
How do you come to that conclusion? Simply because you don’t agree with their actions? Otherwise are there trained psychologists who argue that position in detail and try to determine how politicians score on the Hare scale?
Uhm, no. Allow me to quote from my other comment:
I hope it illustrates that my mental model has separate buckets for “people I suspect to be sociopaths” and “people I disagree with”.
Diagnosing mental illness based on the kind of second hand information you have about politicians isn’t a trivial effort. Especially if you lack the background in psychology.