I’ve participated in several alternative communities over the course of my life, and all became mired in scandal. The first was my college, where tolerance of hard drug use by the administration resulted in multiple OD deaths in my time there. The second was in my 20s in an intentional living and festival culture, when a major community figure was accused by multiple women of drugging and raping them while unconscious. The third was the EA and rationality community, which of course has had one scandal after another for years.
My model is that drugs, extreme ideas, mental illness, economic precarity, alternative cultures and institutions, power differences, and violent behavior are mutually reinforcing. Rationalists may drastically underestimate how intensely the recruitment funnel they’ve created selects for interest by disturbed people. Or the extent to which features correlated with the movement, like lifestyle experimentation, alternative spirituality or drug use, may be the central attractions for some, using rationality as a pretext. It’s the opposite of evaporative cooling—it’s condensation of crazy.
My belief is that to counteract this, it’s necessary to promote some level of conformism and convention to the standards and norms of society at large. Think of academia in STEM. Yes, the people and jobs are unusual. But the requirement for participants to repeatedly integrate into new departments at new universities repeatedly and work with many collaborators and a constant churn of new students from around the world makes for a melting pot culture where condensation of crazy is mitigated on a per capita basis.
In short, it seems to me that it’s in the very nature of niche movements and alternative communities to generate scandal for systematic sociological reasons. There is probably no way to retain the niche alt community structure without the scandal. Individuals will have to choose whether or not they prioritize a low frequency of scandal, or having the community exist in its present form.
A question I ask when sizing up a community is “do these people seem likely to be much more scandal-prone than the average church, sports team or workplace?” I also ask this for people I am considering getting to know. I go with my intuition and choose how to engage accordingly.
Rationalists may drastically underestimate how intensely the recruitment funnel they’ve created selects for interest by disturbed people.
Yeah. I wish we had an explicit discussion about this a decade ago.
I guess we didn’t, because it started slowly, and we didn’t sufficiently update about how it changes the situation when a very small mostly online group becomes a larger, partially offline group.
(This is not just our specific blindness, but a general human bias. In some sense, ISO 9001 is about solving a similar situation in business: many business owners fail to notice that you cannot manage a company with 200 employees the same way you did when you had 20.)
And we know how Mensa is a magnet for crazy people, except that in their case those are mostly harmless cranks who want to debunk the theory of relativity, or promote their own theory of quantum physics based on some misunderstood YouTube videos. Unlike Mensa, Less Wrong talks about existential risks, which attracts a different, more dangerous kind of crazy.
So I guess, we should have noticed that community building is a thing that requires domain expertise that we apparently didn’t have. People with more experience might have predicted some problems.
My model is that drugs, extreme ideas, mental illness, economic precarity, alternative cultures and institutions, power differences, and violent behavior are mutually reinforcing.
Extreme ideas are kind of what makes us us, not sure how much we can do about it. But that means we should have pushed harder about the remaining factors.
Drugs seem to be the obvious problem from many people’s perspective… but good luck getting that uncool message across in a group of proud contrarians living in the drug junkie capital of the planet. Mental illness is a difficult topic in a community full of aspies (also, talking about crazy is ableist).
Some problems seem downstream from making Bay Area the center of the rationality community.
My belief is that to counteract this, it’s necessary to promote some level of conformism and convention to the standards and norms of society at large. [...] In short, it seems to me that it’s in the very nature of niche movements and alternative communities to generate scandal for systematic sociological reasons.
I think this is also related to age. Young people are more like “what could possibly go wrong?” and old people are more like “let me tell you a few stories about my friends who died young”. The problems with drugs often fix themselves: people either grow out of it, or they die, or they become the kind of drug junkie who doesn’t inspire others to emulate them. Similarly, a 20 years old crazy person may seem interesting, but a 40 years old crazy person is just obviously failing at life. The older people are, the more you can see the long-term consequences of their lifestyle by looking at them.
Another thing that e.g. the academia has is an explicit membership list, with legible roles. Everyone understands the difference between “a professor of University U did it”, “a student of University U did it”, and “a crazy homeless guy who sometimes sleeps on the bench in front of University U did it”. It doesn’t all collapse to a vague “someone associated with University U did it”. Rationalists do not have any such list, therefore we cannot legibly argue that Ziz is not one of us.
I’ve participated in several alternative communities over the course of my life, and all became mired in scandal. The first was my college, where tolerance of hard drug use by the administration resulted in multiple OD deaths in my time there. The second was in my 20s in an intentional living and festival culture, when a major community figure was accused by multiple women of drugging and raping them while unconscious. The third was the EA and rationality community, which of course has had one scandal after another for years.
My model is that drugs, extreme ideas, mental illness, economic precarity, alternative cultures and institutions, power differences, and violent behavior are mutually reinforcing. Rationalists may drastically underestimate how intensely the recruitment funnel they’ve created selects for interest by disturbed people. Or the extent to which features correlated with the movement, like lifestyle experimentation, alternative spirituality or drug use, may be the central attractions for some, using rationality as a pretext. It’s the opposite of evaporative cooling—it’s condensation of crazy.
My belief is that to counteract this, it’s necessary to promote some level of conformism and convention to the standards and norms of society at large. Think of academia in STEM. Yes, the people and jobs are unusual. But the requirement for participants to repeatedly integrate into new departments at new universities repeatedly and work with many collaborators and a constant churn of new students from around the world makes for a melting pot culture where condensation of crazy is mitigated on a per capita basis.
In short, it seems to me that it’s in the very nature of niche movements and alternative communities to generate scandal for systematic sociological reasons. There is probably no way to retain the niche alt community structure without the scandal. Individuals will have to choose whether or not they prioritize a low frequency of scandal, or having the community exist in its present form.
A question I ask when sizing up a community is “do these people seem likely to be much more scandal-prone than the average church, sports team or workplace?” I also ask this for people I am considering getting to know. I go with my intuition and choose how to engage accordingly.
Yeah. I wish we had an explicit discussion about this a decade ago.
I guess we didn’t, because it started slowly, and we didn’t sufficiently update about how it changes the situation when a very small mostly online group becomes a larger, partially offline group.
(This is not just our specific blindness, but a general human bias. In some sense, ISO 9001 is about solving a similar situation in business: many business owners fail to notice that you cannot manage a company with 200 employees the same way you did when you had 20.)
And we know how Mensa is a magnet for crazy people, except that in their case those are mostly harmless cranks who want to debunk the theory of relativity, or promote their own theory of quantum physics based on some misunderstood YouTube videos. Unlike Mensa, Less Wrong talks about existential risks, which attracts a different, more dangerous kind of crazy.
So I guess, we should have noticed that community building is a thing that requires domain expertise that we apparently didn’t have. People with more experience might have predicted some problems.
Extreme ideas are kind of what makes us us, not sure how much we can do about it. But that means we should have pushed harder about the remaining factors.
Drugs seem to be the obvious problem from many people’s perspective… but good luck getting that uncool message across in a group of proud contrarians living in the drug junkie capital of the planet. Mental illness is a difficult topic in a community full of aspies (also, talking about crazy is ableist).
Some problems seem downstream from making Bay Area the center of the rationality community.
I think this is also related to age. Young people are more like “what could possibly go wrong?” and old people are more like “let me tell you a few stories about my friends who died young”. The problems with drugs often fix themselves: people either grow out of it, or they die, or they become the kind of drug junkie who doesn’t inspire others to emulate them. Similarly, a 20 years old crazy person may seem interesting, but a 40 years old crazy person is just obviously failing at life. The older people are, the more you can see the long-term consequences of their lifestyle by looking at them.
Another thing that e.g. the academia has is an explicit membership list, with legible roles. Everyone understands the difference between “a professor of University U did it”, “a student of University U did it”, and “a crazy homeless guy who sometimes sleeps on the bench in front of University U did it”. It doesn’t all collapse to a vague “someone associated with University U did it”. Rationalists do not have any such list, therefore we cannot legibly argue that Ziz is not one of us.