I felt like the OP was already quite long enough, and don’t have time now to write the full followup post that this question deserves, but in brief, the thrust would be that any rationalist organization deserving of the name would carefully choose its norms, structure and bylaws to reflect those of the most successful existing organizations (empiricism!), with care taken to exclude the aspects of those organizations that are inimical to group or individual rationality. Thus, even if stoning apostates has proven to be an empirically useful organizational strategy from the perspective of growth, it’s probably not something we want to emulate.
I’m not sure if we can actually offer an unfalsifiable signal that we are on the “true path”. I’m not sure if we even necessarily need or want to do that. In order to justify the existence of the “Don’t Shoot Yourself in the Foot Club”, you just need to demonstrate that not shooting yourself in the foot is better than the alternative, and I think we can do at least that, metaphorically.
Also, I actually suspect that any formal structure at all would probably be, on net, more of a good thing than a bad thing, in terms of growing the movement.
In order to justify the existence of the “Don’t Shoot Yourself in the Foot Club”, you just need to demonstrate that not shooting yourself in the foot is better than the alternative, and I think we can do at least that, metaphorically.
Well, now, this is not quite right, I think, or rather it’s incomplete. What’s missing (and what I suspect you were assuming—but should definitely be stated explicitly!) is that the members of the “Don’t Shoot Yourself in the Foot Club” should, in actual fact, successfully avoid shooting themselves in the foot (or, to state it in a less binary fashion: should shoot themselves in the foot measurably less than non-members).
This may seem like an obvious point, but in fact there is nothing surprising about a “Do X Club” that doesn’t do X. After all, having the power of telekinesis is clearly better than not having the power of telekinesis, but I do not think that this fact suffices to justify the existence of a “Have the Power of Telekinesis Club”!
Again, this ought to be stated explicitly, precisely because “does your ‘Do X Club’ actually do X” is an empirical, and very much open, question.
Also, I actually suspect that any formal structure at all would probably be, on net, more of a good thing than a bad thing, in terms of growing the movement.
I wonder about this. Is the average Christian more “Christian” than the average non-Christian? (Do they do good works for strangers, love and forgive their enemies, and live lives of poverty and service, at rates significantly above the population average?) If not, does that really affect their ability to grow? Has it really affected their ability to grow, historically?
Is that who we want to emulate? Christianity? (Or, perhaps, the largest single Christian organization—the Catholic Church? Of all the times to pick the Catholic Church as a role model, now seems to be an unusually bad time to do so…)
And is “growth” our only, or our most important, goal?
My point was merely that you can found a club around an aspiration rather than an accomplishment. It’s better to have the accomplishment, of course, but not necessary.
But let’s follow your reasoning—and the analogy with Christianity—a bit further.
Christianity was founded around an aspiration: to be more Christian (defined as “do good works for strangers, loving and forgiving their enemies, and living lives of poverty and service”) than people who aren’t members.
They survived, and grew—very successfully.
Let us take the implication in your question for granted, and stipulate that the average Christian today is not more Christian than the average non-Christian.
The aspiration around which Christianity was founded, would seem to not have been attained.
By analogy, you propose to found a club around an aspiration: to be more rational than people who aren’t members of the club.
It seems plausible that, having done this, our club can successfully survive and grow.
However—assuming the pattern holds (and we have no particular reason to think that it won’t)—members of our club will not be more rational than non-members. Our aspiration will not have been attained.
In short, this reasoning seems to endorse the following trade-off: survive and grow by sacrificing your goals.
I think you might be overlooking the widespread cultural effects of Christian memes. When I had a similar discussion with a friend I argued “imagine a society in which the 12 Virtues had the place the 10 Commandments (or maybe the Beatitudes) do in ours”.
Not everyone or even most people actually _follow_ the 10 Commandments and it is debatable whether Christians follow them any more frequently than non-Christians but if you compare a ours to a society that had basically _never heard_ of the 10 Commandments I think it is hard to imagine that other society would have more Commandment-followers.
Christian memes are _absurdly_ pervasive in the Western canon to the point where historically even secularists conducted their intellectual discourse in Christian ideas.
Consider a world in which children’s literature is filled with rationalist ideas and Good Moral Teaching is all about being a good rationalist and even anti-rationalists have to define themselves on the terms of the rationalists in order to be an effective counter-movement and most people _know_ they’re supposed to Make Their Beliefs Pay Rent and Destroy What Can Be Destroyed By The Truth even if they don’t bother to actually do so most of the time.
I would expect this world to actually be more rational, on net, than our own. In fact, I think that if such a world is _not_ more rational then it is a damning indictment of group rationalism in general and possibly evidence that the whole affair to be a waste of energy.
I have a guess as to how this would actually evolve.
While the median Christian is not particularly Christian, there probably are a good number of pretty excellent Christians, whose motivation for being thus is their commitment to the ideals that they profess. So it’s possible—even likely—that Christianity actually makes the world a little bit more “in the image of Christ” on the margin.
If you have a billion Christians, the number of “actually pretty good” Christians is likely to be pretty high.
Right now we probably have barely thousands of Rationalists who would identify as such. An organized attempt at increasing that number, with a formal aspiration to be better rationalists, would increase the number of “actually pretty good” rationalists, although the median rationalist might just be somebody who read 4% of the Sequences and went to two meetups. But that would still be a win.
Hmm. Well, certainly the full follow-up would be a tremendously valuable thing to have, so whenever you have the time to write it, I definitely think that you should!
But for now:
… any rationalist organization deserving of the name would carefully choose its norms, structure and bylaws to reflect those of the most successful existing organizations (empiricism!), with care taken to exclude the aspects of those organizations that are inimical to group or individual rationality.
Hm, indeed. Obvious follow-up questions:
By “rationality”, here, do you mean epistemic or instrumental rationality? Or both? (And if “both”, which is prioritized if they conflict? Or, must aspects of successful organizations that are inimical to either epistemic or instrumental rationality, and either group or individual versions of each, all be excluded?)
What should an aspiring rationalist organization do if, upon empirical investigation, it turns out that the norms, structure, and bylaws shared by all the most successful existing organizations turn out to all be inimical to group or individual rationality?
Regarding both follow-up questions, I have two answers:
Answer 1: I don’t intend for this to be a dodge, but I don’t think it really matters what I think. I don’t think it’s practical to construct “the perfect organization” in our imagination and then anticipate that its perfection will be realized.
I think what a rationality organization looks like in practice is a small group of essentially like-minded people creating a Schelling point by forming the initial structure, and then the organization evolves from there in ways that are not necessarily predictable, in ways that reflect the will of the people who have the energy to actually put into the thing.
What’s interesting is that when I say it that way, I realize that it sounds like a recipe for disaster. But also note that essentially no other organization on Earth has been formed in any other way.
Answer 2: I personally would create separate organizational branches for epistemic and instrumental focus, such that both could use the resources of the other, but neither would be constrained by the rules of the other. Either branch could use whatever policies are most suited to themselves. Think two houses of a congress. Either of the branches could propose policies to govern the whole organization, which could be accepted or vetoed by the other branch. There’s probably also a role for something like an elected executive branch, but at this point I am grasping well beyond my domain of expertise.
What’s interesting is that when I say it that way, I realize that it sounds like a recipe for disaster. But also note that essentially no other organization on Earth has been formed in any other way.
I’m not so sure about that. Perhaps you meant “no other [freestanding] organization on Earth has been formed [by people without access to massive amounts of resources] any other way”.
To elaborate on the distinction, I can point to organizations like NASA, or the Manhattan Project. They were created, from the beginning, as large groups, with pre-planned bureaucratic structures and formal lines of authority. While there was a certain level of organic growth, it’s not like these things started in a garage and grew outward from there. Similarly, in private industry, when IBM embarked on its OS/360 project, or Microsoft embarked on Windows Vista, these were not small efforts started by a group of insurgents. Rather, they were responses to concrete opportunities/threats (a new mainframe, Netscape) that were identified by the leadership of the parent organization, who then mobilized the appropriate resources.
I think this matters beyond mere pedantry. You’ve identified one way to spread rationalism—bottom up, by establishing a small group of rationalists, who then spread their doctrine outwards. I’m saying there’s another way: identify leaders, convince them that rationality is a good thing to focus on, and then have them mobilize the appropriate resources to spread rationality. If you could convince Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Warren Buffett and Carlos Slim that they should fund rationality with the full force of their collective fortune, then that would potentially do more in a year to spread rationalism than a small organization organically growing for a decade.
Of course, “go big or go home” has its own failure modes, but it’s not actually self-evident that it’s more risky than starting small and spreading outwards. Moreover, the really successful small groups employed a hybrid strategy. They started out as a small group, until the could amass enough resources and prestige to convince influential decision-makers that their cause was worth supporting. The canonical (pun fully intended) example is the Catholic Church, of course. It started as a small, often persecuted group of followers of a particular religious prophet, indistinguishable from the other Jewish spin-offs. However, through steady proselytizing, it grew and converted the aristocracy of the Roman empire. At that point, from the the conversion of Constantine onwards, it became the state religion, and spread rapidly wherever the Roman empire held sway.
I think MIRI also employed a hybrid strategy. I will say, it seems much easier to deploy a “go big or go home” approach after you’ve already created a minimum viable organization, rather than attempting to poach thinkfluencers without even having that groundwork in place.
I felt like the OP was already quite long enough, and don’t have time now to write the full followup post that this question deserves, but in brief, the thrust would be that any rationalist organization deserving of the name would carefully choose its norms, structure and bylaws to reflect those of the most successful existing organizations (empiricism!), with care taken to exclude the aspects of those organizations that are inimical to group or individual rationality. Thus, even if stoning apostates has proven to be an empirically useful organizational strategy from the perspective of growth, it’s probably not something we want to emulate.
I’m not sure if we can actually offer an unfalsifiable signal that we are on the “true path”. I’m not sure if we even necessarily need or want to do that. In order to justify the existence of the “Don’t Shoot Yourself in the Foot Club”, you just need to demonstrate that not shooting yourself in the foot is better than the alternative, and I think we can do at least that, metaphorically.
Also, I actually suspect that any formal structure at all would probably be, on net, more of a good thing than a bad thing, in terms of growing the movement.
Well, now, this is not quite right, I think, or rather it’s incomplete. What’s missing (and what I suspect you were assuming—but should definitely be stated explicitly!) is that the members of the “Don’t Shoot Yourself in the Foot Club” should, in actual fact, successfully avoid shooting themselves in the foot (or, to state it in a less binary fashion: should shoot themselves in the foot measurably less than non-members).
This may seem like an obvious point, but in fact there is nothing surprising about a “Do X Club” that doesn’t do X. After all, having the power of telekinesis is clearly better than not having the power of telekinesis, but I do not think that this fact suffices to justify the existence of a “Have the Power of Telekinesis Club”!
Again, this ought to be stated explicitly, precisely because “does your ‘Do X Club’ actually do X” is an empirical, and very much open, question.
I concur with this wholeheartedly.
I wonder about this. Is the average Christian more “Christian” than the average non-Christian? (Do they do good works for strangers, love and forgive their enemies, and live lives of poverty and service, at rates significantly above the population average?) If not, does that really affect their ability to grow? Has it really affected their ability to grow, historically?
Is that who we want to emulate? Christianity? (Or, perhaps, the largest single Christian organization—the Catholic Church? Of all the times to pick the Catholic Church as a role model, now seems to be an unusually bad time to do so…)
And is “growth” our only, or our most important, goal?
My point was merely that you can found a club around an aspiration rather than an accomplishment. It’s better to have the accomplishment, of course, but not necessary.
But let’s follow your reasoning—and the analogy with Christianity—a bit further.
Christianity was founded around an aspiration: to be more Christian (defined as “do good works for strangers, loving and forgiving their enemies, and living lives of poverty and service”) than people who aren’t members.
They survived, and grew—very successfully.
Let us take the implication in your question for granted, and stipulate that the average Christian today is not more Christian than the average non-Christian.
The aspiration around which Christianity was founded, would seem to not have been attained.
By analogy, you propose to found a club around an aspiration: to be more rational than people who aren’t members of the club.
It seems plausible that, having done this, our club can successfully survive and grow.
However—assuming the pattern holds (and we have no particular reason to think that it won’t)—members of our club will not be more rational than non-members. Our aspiration will not have been attained.
In short, this reasoning seems to endorse the following trade-off: survive and grow by sacrificing your goals.
Is that what you really want?
I think you might be overlooking the widespread cultural effects of Christian memes. When I had a similar discussion with a friend I argued “imagine a society in which the 12 Virtues had the place the 10 Commandments (or maybe the Beatitudes) do in ours”.
Not everyone or even most people actually _follow_ the 10 Commandments and it is debatable whether Christians follow them any more frequently than non-Christians but if you compare a ours to a society that had basically _never heard_ of the 10 Commandments I think it is hard to imagine that other society would have more Commandment-followers.
Christian memes are _absurdly_ pervasive in the Western canon to the point where historically even secularists conducted their intellectual discourse in Christian ideas.
Consider a world in which children’s literature is filled with rationalist ideas and Good Moral Teaching is all about being a good rationalist and even anti-rationalists have to define themselves on the terms of the rationalists in order to be an effective counter-movement and most people _know_ they’re supposed to Make Their Beliefs Pay Rent and Destroy What Can Be Destroyed By The Truth even if they don’t bother to actually do so most of the time.
I would expect this world to actually be more rational, on net, than our own. In fact, I think that if such a world is _not_ more rational then it is a damning indictment of group rationalism in general and possibly evidence that the whole affair to be a waste of energy.
I have a guess as to how this would actually evolve.
While the median Christian is not particularly Christian, there probably are a good number of pretty excellent Christians, whose motivation for being thus is their commitment to the ideals that they profess. So it’s possible—even likely—that Christianity actually makes the world a little bit more “in the image of Christ” on the margin.
If you have a billion Christians, the number of “actually pretty good” Christians is likely to be pretty high.
Right now we probably have barely thousands of Rationalists who would identify as such. An organized attempt at increasing that number, with a formal aspiration to be better rationalists, would increase the number of “actually pretty good” rationalists, although the median rationalist might just be somebody who read 4% of the Sequences and went to two meetups. But that would still be a win.
Hmm. Well, certainly the full follow-up would be a tremendously valuable thing to have, so whenever you have the time to write it, I definitely think that you should!
But for now:
Hm, indeed. Obvious follow-up questions:
By “rationality”, here, do you mean epistemic or instrumental rationality? Or both? (And if “both”, which is prioritized if they conflict? Or, must aspects of successful organizations that are inimical to either epistemic or instrumental rationality, and either group or individual versions of each, all be excluded?)
What should an aspiring rationalist organization do if, upon empirical investigation, it turns out that the norms, structure, and bylaws shared by all the most successful existing organizations turn out to all be inimical to group or individual rationality?
Regarding both follow-up questions, I have two answers:
Answer 1: I don’t intend for this to be a dodge, but I don’t think it really matters what I think. I don’t think it’s practical to construct “the perfect organization” in our imagination and then anticipate that its perfection will be realized.
I think what a rationality organization looks like in practice is a small group of essentially like-minded people creating a Schelling point by forming the initial structure, and then the organization evolves from there in ways that are not necessarily predictable, in ways that reflect the will of the people who have the energy to actually put into the thing.
What’s interesting is that when I say it that way, I realize that it sounds like a recipe for disaster. But also note that essentially no other organization on Earth has been formed in any other way.
Answer 2: I personally would create separate organizational branches for epistemic and instrumental focus, such that both could use the resources of the other, but neither would be constrained by the rules of the other. Either branch could use whatever policies are most suited to themselves. Think two houses of a congress. Either of the branches could propose policies to govern the whole organization, which could be accepted or vetoed by the other branch. There’s probably also a role for something like an elected executive branch, but at this point I am grasping well beyond my domain of expertise.
I’m not so sure about that. Perhaps you meant “no other [freestanding] organization on Earth has been formed [by people without access to massive amounts of resources] any other way”.
To elaborate on the distinction, I can point to organizations like NASA, or the Manhattan Project. They were created, from the beginning, as large groups, with pre-planned bureaucratic structures and formal lines of authority. While there was a certain level of organic growth, it’s not like these things started in a garage and grew outward from there. Similarly, in private industry, when IBM embarked on its OS/360 project, or Microsoft embarked on Windows Vista, these were not small efforts started by a group of insurgents. Rather, they were responses to concrete opportunities/threats (a new mainframe, Netscape) that were identified by the leadership of the parent organization, who then mobilized the appropriate resources.
I think this matters beyond mere pedantry. You’ve identified one way to spread rationalism—bottom up, by establishing a small group of rationalists, who then spread their doctrine outwards. I’m saying there’s another way: identify leaders, convince them that rationality is a good thing to focus on, and then have them mobilize the appropriate resources to spread rationality. If you could convince Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Warren Buffett and Carlos Slim that they should fund rationality with the full force of their collective fortune, then that would potentially do more in a year to spread rationalism than a small organization organically growing for a decade.
Of course, “go big or go home” has its own failure modes, but it’s not actually self-evident that it’s more risky than starting small and spreading outwards. Moreover, the really successful small groups employed a hybrid strategy. They started out as a small group, until the could amass enough resources and prestige to convince influential decision-makers that their cause was worth supporting. The canonical (pun fully intended) example is the Catholic Church, of course. It started as a small, often persecuted group of followers of a particular religious prophet, indistinguishable from the other Jewish spin-offs. However, through steady proselytizing, it grew and converted the aristocracy of the Roman empire. At that point, from the the conversion of Constantine onwards, it became the state religion, and spread rapidly wherever the Roman empire held sway.
I think MIRI also employed a hybrid strategy. I will say, it seems much easier to deploy a “go big or go home” approach after you’ve already created a minimum viable organization, rather than attempting to poach thinkfluencers without even having that groundwork in place.