The reason why I asked was not just “who can we be pattern-matched with?”, but also “what can we predict from this pattern-matching?”. Not merely to say “X is like Y”, but to say “X is like Y, and p(Y) is true, therefore it is possible that p(X) is also true”.
Here are two answers pattern-matching LW to a cult. For me, the interesting question here is: “how do cults evolve?”. Because that can be used to predict how LW will evolve. Not connotations, but predictions of future experiences.
My impression of cults is that they essentially have three possible futures: Some of them become small, increasingly isolated groups, that die with their members. Others are viral enough to keep replacing the old members with new members, and grow. The most successful ones discover a way of living that does not burn out their members, and become religions. -- Extinction, virality, or symbiosis.
What determines which way a cult will go? Probably it’s compatibility of long-term membership with ordinary human life. If it’s too costly, if it requires too much sacrifice from members, symbiosis is impossible. The other two choices probably depend on how much effort does the group put into recruiting new members.
Having too many young people is some evidence of incompatibility. Perhaps the group requires a level of sacrifice that a university student can pay, but an employed father or mother with children simply cannot. What happens to the members who are unable to give the sacrifice? Well… in LW community nothing happens to anyone. How boring! It’s not like I will become excommunicated if I stop reading the website every day. (Although, I may be excommunicated from the “top contributors, 30 days” list.) So the question is whether members who don’t have too much time can still find the community meaningful, or whether they will leave voluntarily. In other words: Is LessWrong useful for an older person with a busy family life? -- If yes, symbiosis is possible; if no, it’s probably virality as long as the website and rationality seminars keep attracting new people, or extinction if they fail to.
In this light, I am happy about recent Gunnar’s articles, and I hope he will not be alone. Because the cult (or Mormonism) analogy suggests that this is the right way to go, for long-term sustainability.
The other analogy, with shining self-improvement seminars, seems more worrying to me. In self-improvement seminars, the speakers are not rewarded for actually helping people; they are rewarded for sounding good. (We know the names of some self-help gurus… but don’t know the names of people who became awesome because of their seminars. Their references are all about their image, none about their product.) Is rationality advice similar?
This is an old problem, actually the problem discussed in the oldest article on LessWrong: if we can’t measure rationality, we can’t measure improvements in rationality… and then all we can say about CFAR rationality lessons is that they feel good. -- Unless perhaps the questionnaires given to people who did and didn’t attend rationality minicamps showed some interesting results.
And by the way, whether we have or don’t have an applied rationality subreddit, doesn’t seem too important to me. The important thing is, whether we have or don’t have applied rationality articles. (Those articles could as well be posted in Main or Discussion. And the new subreddit will not generate them automatically.)
The reason why I asked was not just “who can we be pattern-matched with?”, but also “what can we predict from this pattern-matching?”. Not merely to say “X is like Y”, but to say “X is like Y, and p(Y) is true, therefore it is possible that p(X) is also true”.
Agreed. One of the reasons why I wrote a comment that was a bunch of links to other posts is because I think that there is a lot to say about this topic. Just “LW is like the Mormon Church” was worth ~5 posts in main.
In other words: Is LessWrong useful for an older person with a busy family life?
A related question: is LessWrong useful for people who are awesome, or just people who want to become awesome? This is part of patrissimo’s point: if you’re spending an hour a day on LW instead of an hour a day exercising, you may be losing the instrumental rationality battle. If someone who used to be part of the LW community stops posting because they’ve become too awesome, that has unpleasant implications for the dynamics of the community.
And by the way, whether we have or don’t have an applied rationality subreddit, doesn’t seem too important to me.
I was interested in that because “difference between the time a good idea is suggested and the time that idea is implemented” seems like an interesting reference class.
Isn’t this a danger that all online communities face? Those who procrastinate a lot online get a natural advantage against those who don’t. Thus, unless the community is specifically designed against that (how exactly?), the procrastinators will become the elite.
(It’s an implication: Not every procrastinator becomes a member of elite, but all members of elite are procrastinators.)
Perhaps we could make an exception for Eliezer, because for him writing the hundreds of articles was not procrastination. But unless writing a lot of stuff online is one’s goal, then procrastination is almost a necessity to get a celebrity status on a website.
Then we should perhaps think about how to prevent this effect. A few months ago we had some concerned posts against “Eternal September” and stuff. But this is more dangerous, because it’s less visible, it is a slow, yet predictable change, towards procrastination.
Isn’t this a danger that all online communities face?
Yes, which is I think a rather good support for having physical meetups.
Then we should perhaps think about how to prevent this effect.
Agreed.
A few months ago we had some concerned posts against “Eternal September” and stuff. But this is more dangerous, because it’s less visible, it is a slow, yet predictable change, towards procrastination.
Note that many of the Eternal September complaints are about this, though indirectly: the fear is that the most awesome members of a discussion are the ones most aggravated by newcomers, because of the distance between them and newcomers is larger than the difference between a median member and a newcomer. The most awesome people also generally have better alternatives, and thus are more sensitive to shifts in quality.
Supporting this, I’ll note that I don’t see many posts from, say, Wei Dai or Salamon in recent history—though as I joined all of a month of ago take that with a dish of salt.
I wonder if something on the MIRI/CFAR end would help? Incentives on the actual researchers to make occasional (not too many, they do have more important things to do) posts on LessWrong would probably alleviate the effect.
Perhaps to some degree, different karma coefficients could be used to support what we consider useful on reflection (not just on impulse voting). For example, if a well-researched article generated more karma than a month of procrastinating while writing comments...
There is some support for this: articles in Main get 10× more karma than comments. But 10 is probably not enough, and also it is not obvious what exactly belongs to Main; it’s very unclearly defined. Maybe there could be a Research subreddit where only scientific-level articles are allowed, and there the karma coefficient could be pretty high. (Alternatively, to prevent karma inflation, the karma from comments should be divided by 10.)
The other analogy, with shining self-improvement seminars, seems more worrying to me. In self-improvement seminars, the speakers are not rewarded for actually helping people; they are rewarded for sounding good. (We know the names of some self-help gurus… but don’t know the names of people who became awesome because of their seminars. Their references are all about their image, none about their product.)
I don’t think that “sounding good” is a accurate description of how people in the personal development field succeed.
Look at Tony Robbins who one of the most successful in the business. When you ask most people whether walking on hot coal is impressive they would tell you that it is. Tony manages to get thousands of people in a seminar to walk over hot coals.
Afterwards they go home and tell there friends about who they walked about hot coals. That impresses people and more people come to his seminars.
It not only that his talk sounds good but that he is able to provide impressive experiences.
On the other hand his success is also partly about being very good at building a network marketing structure that works.
But in some sense that not much different than the way universities work. They evidence that universities actually make people successful in life isn’t that strong.
What determines which way a cult will go? Probably it’s compatibility of long-term membership with ordinary human life. If it’s too costly, if it requires too much sacrifice from members, symbiosis is impossible. The other two choices probably depend on how much effort does the group put into recruiting new members.
I don’t think so. If you are a scientologist and believe in Xenu that reduces your compatibility with ordinary human life. At the same time it makes you more committed to the group if you are willing something to belong.
Opus Dei members wear cilice to make themselves uncomfortable to show that they are committed.
I think the fact that you don’t see where many people as members of groups that need a lot of commitment is a feature of 20th century where mainstream society with institution such as television that are good at presenting a certain culture which everyone in a country has a shared identity.
At the moment all sort of groups like the Amnish or LDS that require more commitment of their members seem to grow. It could be that we have a lot more people as members of groups that require sacrifice in a hundred years than we have now.
The reason why I asked was not just “who can we be pattern-matched with?”, but also “what can we predict from this pattern-matching?”. Not merely to say “X is like Y”, but to say “X is like Y, and p(Y) is true, therefore it is possible that p(X) is also true”.
Here are two answers pattern-matching LW to a cult. For me, the interesting question here is: “how do cults evolve?”. Because that can be used to predict how LW will evolve. Not connotations, but predictions of future experiences.
My impression of cults is that they essentially have three possible futures: Some of them become small, increasingly isolated groups, that die with their members. Others are viral enough to keep replacing the old members with new members, and grow. The most successful ones discover a way of living that does not burn out their members, and become religions. -- Extinction, virality, or symbiosis.
What determines which way a cult will go? Probably it’s compatibility of long-term membership with ordinary human life. If it’s too costly, if it requires too much sacrifice from members, symbiosis is impossible. The other two choices probably depend on how much effort does the group put into recruiting new members.
Having too many young people is some evidence of incompatibility. Perhaps the group requires a level of sacrifice that a university student can pay, but an employed father or mother with children simply cannot. What happens to the members who are unable to give the sacrifice? Well… in LW community nothing happens to anyone. How boring! It’s not like I will become excommunicated if I stop reading the website every day. (Although, I may be excommunicated from the “top contributors, 30 days” list.) So the question is whether members who don’t have too much time can still find the community meaningful, or whether they will leave voluntarily. In other words: Is LessWrong useful for an older person with a busy family life? -- If yes, symbiosis is possible; if no, it’s probably virality as long as the website and rationality seminars keep attracting new people, or extinction if they fail to.
In this light, I am happy about recent Gunnar’s articles, and I hope he will not be alone. Because the cult (or Mormonism) analogy suggests that this is the right way to go, for long-term sustainability.
The other analogy, with shining self-improvement seminars, seems more worrying to me. In self-improvement seminars, the speakers are not rewarded for actually helping people; they are rewarded for sounding good. (We know the names of some self-help gurus… but don’t know the names of people who became awesome because of their seminars. Their references are all about their image, none about their product.) Is rationality advice similar?
This is an old problem, actually the problem discussed in the oldest article on LessWrong: if we can’t measure rationality, we can’t measure improvements in rationality… and then all we can say about CFAR rationality lessons is that they feel good. -- Unless perhaps the questionnaires given to people who did and didn’t attend rationality minicamps showed some interesting results.
And by the way, whether we have or don’t have an applied rationality subreddit, doesn’t seem too important to me. The important thing is, whether we have or don’t have applied rationality articles. (Those articles could as well be posted in Main or Discussion. And the new subreddit will not generate them automatically.)
Agreed. One of the reasons why I wrote a comment that was a bunch of links to other posts is because I think that there is a lot to say about this topic. Just “LW is like the Mormon Church” was worth ~5 posts in main.
A related question: is LessWrong useful for people who are awesome, or just people who want to become awesome? This is part of patrissimo’s point: if you’re spending an hour a day on LW instead of an hour a day exercising, you may be losing the instrumental rationality battle. If someone who used to be part of the LW community stops posting because they’ve become too awesome, that has unpleasant implications for the dynamics of the community.
I was interested in that because “difference between the time a good idea is suggested and the time that idea is implemented” seems like an interesting reference class.
Isn’t this a danger that all online communities face? Those who procrastinate a lot online get a natural advantage against those who don’t. Thus, unless the community is specifically designed against that (how exactly?), the procrastinators will become the elite.
(It’s an implication: Not every procrastinator becomes a member of elite, but all members of elite are procrastinators.)
Perhaps we could make an exception for Eliezer, because for him writing the hundreds of articles was not procrastination. But unless writing a lot of stuff online is one’s goal, then procrastination is almost a necessity to get a celebrity status on a website.
Then we should perhaps think about how to prevent this effect. A few months ago we had some concerned posts against “Eternal September” and stuff. But this is more dangerous, because it’s less visible, it is a slow, yet predictable change, towards procrastination.
Yes, which is I think a rather good support for having physical meetups.
Agreed.
Note that many of the Eternal September complaints are about this, though indirectly: the fear is that the most awesome members of a discussion are the ones most aggravated by newcomers, because of the distance between them and newcomers is larger than the difference between a median member and a newcomer. The most awesome people also generally have better alternatives, and thus are more sensitive to shifts in quality.
Supporting this, I’ll note that I don’t see many posts from, say, Wei Dai or Salamon in recent history—though as I joined all of a month of ago take that with a dish of salt.
I wonder if something on the MIRI/CFAR end would help? Incentives on the actual researchers to make occasional (not too many, they do have more important things to do) posts on LessWrong would probably alleviate the effect.
Perhaps to some degree, different karma coefficients could be used to support what we consider useful on reflection (not just on impulse voting). For example, if a well-researched article generated more karma than a month of procrastinating while writing comments...
There is some support for this: articles in Main get 10× more karma than comments. But 10 is probably not enough, and also it is not obvious what exactly belongs to Main; it’s very unclearly defined. Maybe there could be a Research subreddit where only scientific-level articles are allowed, and there the karma coefficient could be pretty high. (Alternatively, to prevent karma inflation, the karma from comments should be divided by 10.)
I don’t think that “sounding good” is a accurate description of how people in the personal development field succeed.
Look at Tony Robbins who one of the most successful in the business. When you ask most people whether walking on hot coal is impressive they would tell you that it is. Tony manages to get thousands of people in a seminar to walk over hot coals.
Afterwards they go home and tell there friends about who they walked about hot coals. That impresses people and more people come to his seminars.
It not only that his talk sounds good but that he is able to provide impressive experiences.
On the other hand his success is also partly about being very good at building a network marketing structure that works.
But in some sense that not much different than the way universities work. They evidence that universities actually make people successful in life isn’t that strong.
I don’t think so. If you are a scientologist and believe in Xenu that reduces your compatibility with ordinary human life. At the same time it makes you more committed to the group if you are willing something to belong.
Opus Dei members wear cilice to make themselves uncomfortable to show that they are committed.
I think the fact that you don’t see where many people as members of groups that need a lot of commitment is a feature of 20th century where mainstream society with institution such as television that are good at presenting a certain culture which everyone in a country has a shared identity.
At the moment all sort of groups like the Amnish or LDS that require more commitment of their members seem to grow. It could be that we have a lot more people as members of groups that require sacrifice in a hundred years than we have now.