Many of the Dragons who stepped into the role of the Ghost for a time did so softly and gradually, and it never felt like this level of absence was Notably Different from the previous level, in a paradox-of-the-heap sort of way. Set a bar, and set a gradient around that bar, and stay in contact.
As the person who fell most heavily into this role, the above resonates a lot. Below are some other thoughts on my experience.
I had the sense early on that I wasn’t getting very much value out of group activities, and felt not very connected to the house. In this way I think “Black Knight”-style considerations were major contributors to my Ghost behavior. Competing commitments and general depression were also relevant. I didn’t really feel like there was much the house could do to help me with that, but I don’t know whether that’s true. If it weren’t for the Black Knight dynamic, I think I would have prioritized DA over other commitments, but depression may have been sufficient for me to end up as a Ghost anyway.
Not Getting Value Out of Group Activities
The things that the whole house can do (or even a large subset) are unlikely to be the on the capability frontier of the individual in an area of serious interest for that individual. Everyone needs to be able to do the thing, and there will be more variance in skill in areas that are a major focus of some but not all of the group. Programming ability is an example.
Because of something like this, DA group activities rarely felt like they were on a growth-edge that I cared about. In particular, group exercise usually felt costly with little benefit, and I never managed to get EE to be especially valuable for me. Social things like our weekly house dinner (a substantial fraction of Dragon Army hours) felt less fun or less growthy than the likely alternatives, but I probably put unusually low value on this kind of bonding.
Now when I imagine a group that is striving for excellence, it seems like there are two ways it can work:
1) The members share a common major project and can work together towards that goal. Here it makes sense for the group to ask for a high time commitment from its members, since time put towards the group directly advances a major goal of the individual.
2) The members have different goals. In this case it seems like the group should ask for a smaller time commitment. Members can mutually draw inspiration from each other and can coordinate when there is a shared goal, but generally the group should offer affordances, not impose requirements.
Counter-evidence: I think I would have gotten a lot of value out of covering the bases on dimensions I care about. Exercise was supposed to do this, and would do it along Duncan’s version of the “capable well-rounded human” dimension. We discussed doing something like this for rationality skills, but we didn’t follow through.
In this case, all members share a common goal of reaching a minimum bar in some area. Still, this can be boring for those who are already above the bar, and for me this sort of “catching up”/”covering the bases” is much less exciting than pushing forward on a main area of interest. (Which means group-time still ends up as less-fun-than-the-alternative by default.)
There were experiments intended to incentivize Dragons to do solo work on things they considered high priority, but my impression was that there was little encouragement/accountability/useful structure. Things I was originally excited about turned into homework I had to do for DA.
… and the hope of the high-commitment, all-in, lock-yourself-in-a-box model was that people would chafe within the frame, without making moves to destroy the frame itself. i.e., once “stuck,” things like Adom’s dissatisfaction or sense of wasted time would propel him to push things in more productive directions, become more present with the group, make needs known, start making trades, etc., and then we’d iterate toward something better.
But this requires something that I and the house and Adom did not manage to synch up on, whether it’s a tight enough box, or a sufficiently high level of ground safety and trust, or individual self-discipline, or what.
(above I’m trying to avoid assigning specific fault because I don’t actually know which billiard balls bouncing around in the system led to the result we got; it’s plausible that this specific case is all my fault or all Adom’s fault or part of each or split between me and Adom and the rest of the house or influenced by outside factors etc. etc. etc.)
But this requires something that I and the house and Adom did not manage to synch up on, whether it’s a tight enough box, or a sufficiently high level of ground safety and trust, or individual self-discipline, or what.
There’s a feeling I’ve been playing with over the last year whose True Name is something like “I would follow this man into battle.”
I think many people nowadays have pretty screwy relationships with authority due to having spent a lot of time being forced to submit to authority figures that they didn’t choose or respect (e.g. parents, random teachers in school), but that in principle a much healthier relationship is possible. Nearly the only example I can easily find and point to of this dynamic is fictional: it’s the way Rider from Fate/Zero interacts with his army. When you respect / love / whatever your commander enough, things you are doing on their behalf should not feel in any way like impositions / homework, they should roughly feel like things you do for your romantic partners but with a different emotional tone.
I would wildly guess that the basic emotional alignment with the commander necessary to get something like Dragon Army to work is that 1) every member feels this way towards the commander, and 2) this fact is common knowledge. Unfortunately if you don’t have a reference experience for what “I would follow this man into battle” feels like, you have no idea how to tell whether you’re feeling it or not. I’m fairly confident I never felt this feeling before the last year, and although I now think I’ve felt a few weak versions of it I’d guess I haven’t felt it at anywhere near full strength.
In addition to safety and contact, another dynamic was that I was generally not S1 expecting much value to come out of Dragon Army, so chafing more within the system seemed like pain, effort, and time spent for little expected gain.
Stag hunts, anyone?
Edit: Though, I will note that it can be hard to find the space between “I’m damaging the group by excluding my optimization power from the process” and “I’m being a Red Knight here and should be game for whatever the commander decides.” It may seem like the obvious split is “expressive in discussion and game in the field” but discussion time is actually really valuable. So it seems like the actual thing is “be game until the cost to you becomes great enough that something needs to change”. If you reduce the minimum size of misfit enough, then it becomes intractable to deal with everyone’s needs. But then you have to figure out if a recent failure was a result of things being seriously broken or just a sign that you need to Be Better in some operationalized and “doable” way. When do you bring up the problem? It’s hard.
As the person who fell most heavily into this role, the above resonates a lot. Below are some other thoughts on my experience.
I had the sense early on that I wasn’t getting very much value out of group activities, and felt not very connected to the house. In this way I think “Black Knight”-style considerations were major contributors to my Ghost behavior. Competing commitments and general depression were also relevant. I didn’t really feel like there was much the house could do to help me with that, but I don’t know whether that’s true. If it weren’t for the Black Knight dynamic, I think I would have prioritized DA over other commitments, but depression may have been sufficient for me to end up as a Ghost anyway.
Not Getting Value Out of Group Activities
The things that the whole house can do (or even a large subset) are unlikely to be the on the capability frontier of the individual in an area of serious interest for that individual. Everyone needs to be able to do the thing, and there will be more variance in skill in areas that are a major focus of some but not all of the group. Programming ability is an example.
Because of something like this, DA group activities rarely felt like they were on a growth-edge that I cared about. In particular, group exercise usually felt costly with little benefit, and I never managed to get EE to be especially valuable for me. Social things like our weekly house dinner (a substantial fraction of Dragon Army hours) felt less fun or less growthy than the likely alternatives, but I probably put unusually low value on this kind of bonding.
Now when I imagine a group that is striving for excellence, it seems like there are two ways it can work:
1) The members share a common major project and can work together towards that goal. Here it makes sense for the group to ask for a high time commitment from its members, since time put towards the group directly advances a major goal of the individual.
2) The members have different goals. In this case it seems like the group should ask for a smaller time commitment. Members can mutually draw inspiration from each other and can coordinate when there is a shared goal, but generally the group should offer affordances, not impose requirements.
Counter-evidence: I think I would have gotten a lot of value out of covering the bases on dimensions I care about. Exercise was supposed to do this, and would do it along Duncan’s version of the “capable well-rounded human” dimension. We discussed doing something like this for rationality skills, but we didn’t follow through.
In this case, all members share a common goal of reaching a minimum bar in some area. Still, this can be boring for those who are already above the bar, and for me this sort of “catching up”/”covering the bases” is much less exciting than pushing forward on a main area of interest. (Which means group-time still ends up as less-fun-than-the-alternative by default.)
There were experiments intended to incentivize Dragons to do solo work on things they considered high priority, but my impression was that there was little encouragement/accountability/useful structure. Things I was originally excited about turned into homework I had to do for DA.
… and the hope of the high-commitment, all-in, lock-yourself-in-a-box model was that people would chafe within the frame, without making moves to destroy the frame itself. i.e., once “stuck,” things like Adom’s dissatisfaction or sense of wasted time would propel him to push things in more productive directions, become more present with the group, make needs known, start making trades, etc., and then we’d iterate toward something better.
But this requires something that I and the house and Adom did not manage to synch up on, whether it’s a tight enough box, or a sufficiently high level of ground safety and trust, or individual self-discipline, or what.
(above I’m trying to avoid assigning specific fault because I don’t actually know which billiard balls bouncing around in the system led to the result we got; it’s plausible that this specific case is all my fault or all Adom’s fault or part of each or split between me and Adom and the rest of the house or influenced by outside factors etc. etc. etc.)
There’s a feeling I’ve been playing with over the last year whose True Name is something like “I would follow this man into battle.”
I think many people nowadays have pretty screwy relationships with authority due to having spent a lot of time being forced to submit to authority figures that they didn’t choose or respect (e.g. parents, random teachers in school), but that in principle a much healthier relationship is possible. Nearly the only example I can easily find and point to of this dynamic is fictional: it’s the way Rider from Fate/Zero interacts with his army. When you respect / love / whatever your commander enough, things you are doing on their behalf should not feel in any way like impositions / homework, they should roughly feel like things you do for your romantic partners but with a different emotional tone.
I would wildly guess that the basic emotional alignment with the commander necessary to get something like Dragon Army to work is that 1) every member feels this way towards the commander, and 2) this fact is common knowledge. Unfortunately if you don’t have a reference experience for what “I would follow this man into battle” feels like, you have no idea how to tell whether you’re feeling it or not. I’m fairly confident I never felt this feeling before the last year, and although I now think I’ve felt a few weak versions of it I’d guess I haven’t felt it at anywhere near full strength.
A long time ago these sorts of relationships were much more common. In the history literature, one such pattern is called comitatus.
I imagine the modern literature on the subject mostly falls under cults of personality.
Weber called it “charismatic authority”, so there’s another search term.
I would guess there are some commitment & consistency effects involved here—once you’ve followed someone in to battle, you tend to identify with that.
*person
Endorsed.
In addition to safety and contact, another dynamic was that I was generally not S1 expecting much value to come out of Dragon Army, so chafing more within the system seemed like pain, effort, and time spent for little expected gain.
Stag hunts, anyone?
Edit: Though, I will note that it can be hard to find the space between “I’m damaging the group by excluding my optimization power from the process” and “I’m being a Red Knight here and should be game for whatever the commander decides.” It may seem like the obvious split is “expressive in discussion and game in the field” but discussion time is actually really valuable. So it seems like the actual thing is “be game until the cost to you becomes great enough that something needs to change”. If you reduce the minimum size of misfit enough, then it becomes intractable to deal with everyone’s needs. But then you have to figure out if a recent failure was a result of things being seriously broken or just a sign that you need to Be Better in some operationalized and “doable” way. When do you bring up the problem? It’s hard.