How do we (second) convince others, and (first) establish for ourselves, that we’re different? What can we offer to prospective joiners that cannot be offered by other movements (i.e., what can we offer that constitutes an unfalsifiable signal that we are the “true path” to the “good ending”, so to speak)?
I came to this article having just read one about Donald Trump’s response to the 9/11 attacks, which mentioned that Trump saw them from the window of his apartment. The WTC attacks happened at around 9 AM, the start of the standard workday; but he had decided to stay in his apartment later than usual to catch a TV interview with Jack Welch, the former CEO of General Electric.
I thought that was interesting. Welch is well-known in the business world, and at least was once well-regarded. I have one of his books, although I haven’t read it yet.
Now, the problem of how to convince people to pay attention to a memeplex is a problem Less Wrong has. Jack Welch, not so much. I saw his book at a thrift store, had some idea of who he was, and figured it’d be worthwhile to buy it. Donald Trump heard that he’d be on TV, knew well (I assume) who he was, and figured it’d be worthwhile to watch the interview. We aren’t on TV.
Why not?
Maybe it’s because we aren’t Jack Welch.
We’ve all read our Aristotle, right? Our marketers come up with plenty of logos and pathos. Ethos, not so much. But it worked for Jack Welch...
There’s an important difference between the alien’s initial sales pitch and the problem of recruiting people to Less Wrong. The alien is a representative of an advanced civilization, offering a manual for uplifting the human race—so there’s a solution to widely advertising it that will only work if the manual does: simply distribute the manual to a few hundred people around the world who are highly motivated to do well in life. Once they’ve learned it, applied its contents, and become wildly successful CEOs of General Electric or whatever, some of them will (almost certainly) make it known that their success is due to their mastery of the contents of a book...
But the book doesn’t actually exist, we aren’t hot-shit enough to recruit through ethos (why not? could it be that we’re failing? could it be that we’re failing so badly that our startups try to write their own payroll software?), and our sales pitches are pretty bad. I noticed so many of our quality people leaving, and so much lack of interest in *actually winning*, that I stopped paying attention myself—I only saw this post because it was linked on Twitter.
Before asking what LW can offer to prospective joiners that can’t be offered by other movements, ask if it *has* anything like that. I don’t think it does, and I don’t think it’s in a position to get there.
Is it possible to construct a movement which accomplishes our goals, but doesn’t have the failings you describe?
Suppose I am an aspiring rationalist, and would like to do whatever I can to help bring about the existence, and ensure the success, of such a movement. What ought I to do?
(Note that the phrasing of #2—namely, the fact that it’s phrased as a question of individual action—is absolutely critical. It does no good whatsoever to ask what “we” should do. “We” cannot decide to do anything; individuals choose, and individuals act.)
P.S.: It might be necessary also to preface these two questions with a question #0: “What actually are our goals?” (The OP does not quite make it clear—which may or may not be intended.)
0. Are “we” the sort of thing that can have goals? It looks to me like there are a lot of goals going around, and LW isn’t terribly likely to agree on One True Set of Goals, whether ultimate or proximate.
I think one of the neglected possible roles for LW is as a beacon—a (relatively) highly visible institution that draws in people like-minded enough that semirandom interactions are more likely to be productive than semirandom interactions in the ‘hub world’, and allows them to find people sufficiently like-minded that they can then go off and do their own thing, while maintaining a link to LW itself, if only to search it for potential new members of this own thing.
My impression of internet communities in general is that they tend to be like this, and I don’t see any reason to expect LW to be different. Take Newgrounds, another site formed explicitly around productive endeavors (which has the desirable (for my purposes here) property that I spent my middle school years on it): it spawned all sorts of informal friend groups and formal satellite forums, each with its own sort of productive endeavor it was interested in. There was an entire ecosystem of satellite forums (and AIM/MSN group chats, which sometimes spawned satellite forums), from prolific NG forum posters realizing they had enough clout to start their own forum so why not, to forums for people interested in operating within the mainstream tradition of American animation, to a vast proliferation of forums for ‘spammers’ who were interested in playing with NG itself as a medium, to forums for people who were interested in making one specific form of movie—wacky music videos, video game sprite cartoons, whatever. And any given user could be in multiple of these groups, depending on their interests—I was active on at least one forum in each of the categories I’ve listed.
(As an aside: I say ‘spammers’ because that’s what they were called, but later on I developed enough interest in the art world to realize that there’s really no difference between what we did and what they’re doing. (The ‘art game’ people would do well to recognize this—they’re just trolls, but trolling is a art, so what the hell.) There were also ‘anti-spam’ forums, but I brought some of them around.)
1. As for classical LW goals, the AI problem does seem to have benefited quite a bit by ethos arguments. I’m not sure if “our goals” is even the type of noun phrase that *can* have semantic content, but cultivating general quality seems like a fairly broad goal. A movement that wants to gain appeal in the ways I’ve outlined will want its members to be visibly successful at instrumental rationality, and be fine upstanding citizens and so on.
2. I don’t think I’m smarter than Ben Franklin, so my advice for now would be to just do what he did. At a higher level: study successful people with well-known biographies and see if there’s anything that can be abstracted out. I notice (because Athrelon pointed it out a while ago) that Ben Franklin, C.S. Lewis, Tolkien, Thiel, and Musk have one thing in common: the benefit of a secret society or something like it—the Junto, the Inklings, or the Paypal Mafia.
I think there is something like a Platonic “ultimate textbook of human rationality” that may be written in the future, but we don’t actually know its contents. That’s why the visitor can’t give us the book. We have a dual problem: not only the challenge of spreading the ideas, but actually pinning down what the ideas are in the first place.
Actually, I think “pinning down” has entirely the wrong connotations, because human rationality seems more like a living and breathing process rather than a list of maxims chiseled in stone, and to a degree culturally dependent.
I will say that I don’t think you need to answer #0 concretely before you set out. We can guess at the contents of the Platonic rationality textbook, and then iterate as we converge upon it.
I came to this article having just read one about Donald Trump’s response to the 9/11 attacks, which mentioned that Trump saw them from the window of his apartment. The WTC attacks happened at around 9 AM, the start of the standard workday; but he had decided to stay in his apartment later than usual to catch a TV interview with Jack Welch, the former CEO of General Electric.
I thought that was interesting. Welch is well-known in the business world, and at least was once well-regarded. I have one of his books, although I haven’t read it yet.
Now, the problem of how to convince people to pay attention to a memeplex is a problem Less Wrong has. Jack Welch, not so much. I saw his book at a thrift store, had some idea of who he was, and figured it’d be worthwhile to buy it. Donald Trump heard that he’d be on TV, knew well (I assume) who he was, and figured it’d be worthwhile to watch the interview. We aren’t on TV.
Why not?
Maybe it’s because we aren’t Jack Welch.
We’ve all read our Aristotle, right? Our marketers come up with plenty of logos and pathos. Ethos, not so much. But it worked for Jack Welch...
There’s an important difference between the alien’s initial sales pitch and the problem of recruiting people to Less Wrong. The alien is a representative of an advanced civilization, offering a manual for uplifting the human race—so there’s a solution to widely advertising it that will only work if the manual does: simply distribute the manual to a few hundred people around the world who are highly motivated to do well in life. Once they’ve learned it, applied its contents, and become wildly successful CEOs of General Electric or whatever, some of them will (almost certainly) make it known that their success is due to their mastery of the contents of a book...
But the book doesn’t actually exist, we aren’t hot-shit enough to recruit through ethos (why not? could it be that we’re failing? could it be that we’re failing so badly that our startups try to write their own payroll software?), and our sales pitches are pretty bad. I noticed so many of our quality people leaving, and so much lack of interest in *actually winning*, that I stopped paying attention myself—I only saw this post because it was linked on Twitter.
Before asking what LW can offer to prospective joiners that can’t be offered by other movements, ask if it *has* anything like that. I don’t think it does, and I don’t think it’s in a position to get there.
Indeed.
The next things to ask, then, are:
Is it possible to construct a movement which accomplishes our goals, but doesn’t have the failings you describe?
Suppose I am an aspiring rationalist, and would like to do whatever I can to help bring about the existence, and ensure the success, of such a movement. What ought I to do?
(Note that the phrasing of #2—namely, the fact that it’s phrased as a question of individual action—is absolutely critical. It does no good whatsoever to ask what “we” should do. “We” cannot decide to do anything; individuals choose, and individuals act.)
P.S.: It might be necessary also to preface these two questions with a question #0: “What actually are our goals?” (The OP does not quite make it clear—which may or may not be intended.)
These are good questions.
0. Are “we” the sort of thing that can have goals? It looks to me like there are a lot of goals going around, and LW isn’t terribly likely to agree on One True Set of Goals, whether ultimate or proximate.
I think one of the neglected possible roles for LW is as a beacon—a (relatively) highly visible institution that draws in people like-minded enough that semirandom interactions are more likely to be productive than semirandom interactions in the ‘hub world’, and allows them to find people sufficiently like-minded that they can then go off and do their own thing, while maintaining a link to LW itself, if only to search it for potential new members of this own thing.
My impression of internet communities in general is that they tend to be like this, and I don’t see any reason to expect LW to be different. Take Newgrounds, another site formed explicitly around productive endeavors (which has the desirable (for my purposes here) property that I spent my middle school years on it): it spawned all sorts of informal friend groups and formal satellite forums, each with its own sort of productive endeavor it was interested in. There was an entire ecosystem of satellite forums (and AIM/MSN group chats, which sometimes spawned satellite forums), from prolific NG forum posters realizing they had enough clout to start their own forum so why not, to forums for people interested in operating within the mainstream tradition of American animation, to a vast proliferation of forums for ‘spammers’ who were interested in playing with NG itself as a medium, to forums for people who were interested in making one specific form of movie—wacky music videos, video game sprite cartoons, whatever. And any given user could be in multiple of these groups, depending on their interests—I was active on at least one forum in each of the categories I’ve listed.
(As an aside: I say ‘spammers’ because that’s what they were called, but later on I developed enough interest in the art world to realize that there’s really no difference between what we did and what they’re doing. (The ‘art game’ people would do well to recognize this—they’re just trolls, but trolling is a art, so what the hell.) There were also ‘anti-spam’ forums, but I brought some of them around.)
1. As for classical LW goals, the AI problem does seem to have benefited quite a bit by ethos arguments. I’m not sure if “our goals” is even the type of noun phrase that *can* have semantic content, but cultivating general quality seems like a fairly broad goal. A movement that wants to gain appeal in the ways I’ve outlined will want its members to be visibly successful at instrumental rationality, and be fine upstanding citizens and so on.
2. I don’t think I’m smarter than Ben Franklin, so my advice for now would be to just do what he did. At a higher level: study successful people with well-known biographies and see if there’s anything that can be abstracted out. I notice (because Athrelon pointed it out a while ago) that Ben Franklin, C.S. Lewis, Tolkien, Thiel, and Musk have one thing in common: the benefit of a secret society or something like it—the Junto, the Inklings, or the Paypal Mafia.
I think there is something like a Platonic “ultimate textbook of human rationality” that may be written in the future, but we don’t actually know its contents. That’s why the visitor can’t give us the book. We have a dual problem: not only the challenge of spreading the ideas, but actually pinning down what the ideas are in the first place.
Actually, I think “pinning down” has entirely the wrong connotations, because human rationality seems more like a living and breathing process rather than a list of maxims chiseled in stone, and to a degree culturally dependent.
I will say that I don’t think you need to answer #0 concretely before you set out. We can guess at the contents of the Platonic rationality textbook, and then iterate as we converge upon it.