I’ve been thinking about this lately, in large part because the person I’m dating has health problems that cause us as a couple to be much less reliable than I have a reputation for and this has caused serious pushback from some of my friends when I have been unexpectedly unreliable. And frankly I kinda agree with them because, and this is my actual point, we were still used to scheduling activities based on the idea of me being reliable. To the extent reliability necessary virtue to be accepted by society vs. kinda nice is a binary choice I lean toward the former, but I’ve realized that how important it is depends a lot on the type of activities you do. Excluding intentionally stupid hypotheticals like “bet on when people will show up” the activities workable for reliable groups are strictly greater than the set of activities available to less reliable groups, which is why I value reliability, but I think unreliable groups can still be pretty good if you are well calibrated about your group’s reliability. To give some object level examples; having a role playing game with a party of four players can be really fun for reliable groups, but when health issues (mostly my partner’s) lead to both of us missing several games on short notice the rest of the group got angry because their quests were basically unplayable with half the party missing (lots of this was plots aimed at our characters or using specialized skills so they couldn’t just do the halve the number of enemy NPCs thing). On the other hand I was part of a rationality group that had a soft start time/socializing in a public place at the beginnings of meetings and a double digit number of nominal members. It was very common for large chunks of people to flake or be late, but as long as the organizer got in on time it was fine and she aimed to be early.
I’ve been thinking about this lately, in large part because the person I’m dating has health problems that cause us as a couple to be much less reliable than I have a reputation for and this has caused serious pushback from some of my friends when I have been unexpectedly unreliable. And frankly I kinda agree with them because, and this is my actual point, we were still used to scheduling activities based on the idea of me being reliable. To the extent reliability necessary virtue to be accepted by society vs. kinda nice is a binary choice I lean toward the former, but I’ve realized that how important it is depends a lot on the type of activities you do. Excluding intentionally stupid hypotheticals like “bet on when people will show up” the activities workable for reliable groups are strictly greater than the set of activities available to less reliable groups, which is why I value reliability, but I think unreliable groups can still be pretty good if you are well calibrated about your group’s reliability.
To give some object level examples; having a role playing game with a party of four players can be really fun for reliable groups, but when health issues (mostly my partner’s) lead to both of us missing several games on short notice the rest of the group got angry because their quests were basically unplayable with half the party missing (lots of this was plots aimed at our characters or using specialized skills so they couldn’t just do the halve the number of enemy NPCs thing). On the other hand I was part of a rationality group that had a soft start time/socializing in a public place at the beginnings of meetings and a double digit number of nominal members. It was very common for large chunks of people to flake or be late, but as long as the organizer got in on time it was fine and she aimed to be early.