Cooperation needs trust. Many rationalists are quite open towards people who are a bit strange and who would rejected in many social circles. I talked with multiple people who think that this creates a problem of manipulative people entering the community (especially the Bay Area community) and trying to get other people to help them for their own ends. In an environment like that it’s makes sense that members of the community as less willing to share resources with other members of the community and there is less cooperation.
Seems to me that we have members at both extremes. Some of them drop all caution the moment someone else calls themselves a rationalist. Some of them freak out when someone suggests that rationalists should do something together, because that already feels too cultish to them.
My personal experience is mostly with the Vienna community, which may be unusual, because I haven’t seen either extreme there. (Maybe I just didn’t pay enough attention.) I learn about the extremes on the internet.
I wonder what would be the distribution in Bay Area. Specifically, on one axis I would like to see people divided from “extremely trusting” to “extremely mistrusting”, and on another axis, how deeply are those people involved with the rationalist community. That is, whether the extreme people are in the center of the community, or somewhere on the fringe.
I don’t think it’s well modeled as one-dimension of trust. It feels to me like there’s something like shallow trust where people are quite open to cooperate on a low level but quite unwilling to commit to bigger projects together.
Maybe this is somehow related to the “openness to experience” (and/or autism). If you are willing to interact with weird people, you can learn many interesting things most people will never hear about. But you are also more likely to get hurt in a weird way, which is probably the reason most people stay away from weird people.
And as a consequence, you develop some defenses, such as allowing interaction only to some specific degree, and no further. Instead of filtering for safe people, you filter for safe circumstances. Which protects you, but also prevents you from from possible gains, because in reality, some people are more trustworthy than others, and it correlates negatively with some types of weirdness.
Like, instead of “I would probably be okay inviting X and Y to my home, but I have a bad feeling about inviting Z to my home”, you are likely to have a rule “meeting people in cafeteria is okay, inviting them home is taboo”. Similarly, “explaining concepts to someone is okay, investing money together is not”.
So on one hand you are willing to tell a complete stranger in cafeteria the story of your religious deconversion and your opinion on Boltzmann brains (which would be shocking for average people); but you will probably never spend a vacation together with people who are closest to you in intellect and values (which average people do all the time).
Cooperation needs trust. Many rationalists are quite open towards people who are a bit strange and who would rejected in many social circles. I talked with multiple people who think that this creates a problem of manipulative people entering the community (especially the Bay Area community) and trying to get other people to help them for their own ends. In an environment like that it’s makes sense that members of the community as less willing to share resources with other members of the community and there is less cooperation.
Seems to me that we have members at both extremes. Some of them drop all caution the moment someone else calls themselves a rationalist. Some of them freak out when someone suggests that rationalists should do something together, because that already feels too cultish to them.
My personal experience is mostly with the Vienna community, which may be unusual, because I haven’t seen either extreme there. (Maybe I just didn’t pay enough attention.) I learn about the extremes on the internet.
I wonder what would be the distribution in Bay Area. Specifically, on one axis I would like to see people divided from “extremely trusting” to “extremely mistrusting”, and on another axis, how deeply are those people involved with the rationalist community. That is, whether the extreme people are in the center of the community, or somewhere on the fringe.
I don’t think it’s well modeled as one-dimension of trust. It feels to me like there’s something like shallow trust where people are quite open to cooperate on a low level but quite unwilling to commit to bigger projects together.
I think I get what you mean.
Maybe this is somehow related to the “openness to experience” (and/or autism). If you are willing to interact with weird people, you can learn many interesting things most people will never hear about. But you are also more likely to get hurt in a weird way, which is probably the reason most people stay away from weird people.
And as a consequence, you develop some defenses, such as allowing interaction only to some specific degree, and no further. Instead of filtering for safe people, you filter for safe circumstances. Which protects you, but also prevents you from from possible gains, because in reality, some people are more trustworthy than others, and it correlates negatively with some types of weirdness.
Like, instead of “I would probably be okay inviting X and Y to my home, but I have a bad feeling about inviting Z to my home”, you are likely to have a rule “meeting people in cafeteria is okay, inviting them home is taboo”. Similarly, “explaining concepts to someone is okay, investing money together is not”.
So on one hand you are willing to tell a complete stranger in cafeteria the story of your religious deconversion and your opinion on Boltzmann brains (which would be shocking for average people); but you will probably never spend a vacation together with people who are closest to you in intellect and values (which average people do all the time).
Yes, I think that’s roughly where I’m pointing.