For example, if you go to a go club and ask the players there how to get stronger at go, and you take their advice, you’ll both get stronger and go and become more like the kind of person who hangs out in go clubs. If you just want to be in sync with the go club narrative and don’t care about the game, you’ll still ask most of the same questions: the go players will have a hard time telling your real motivation, and it’s not clear to me that they have an incentive to try.
This seems right to me about most go clubs, but there’re a lot of other places that seem to me different on this axis.
Distinguishing features of Go clubs from my POV:
A rapid and trustworthy feedback loop, where everyone wins and loses at non-rigged games of Go regularly. (Opposite of schools proliferating without evidence.)
A lack of need to coordinate individuals. (People win or lose Go games on their own, rather than by needing to organize other people into coordinating their play.)
Some places where I expect “being in sync with the narrative” would diverge more from “just figuring out how to get stronger / how to do the object-level task in a general way”:
A hypothetical Go club that somehow twisted around to boost a famous player’s ego about how very useful his particular life-and-death problems were, or something, maybe so they could keep him around and brag about how they had him at their club, and so individual members could stay on his good side. (Doesn’t seem very likely, but it’s a thought experiment.)
Many groups with an “ideological” slant, e.g. the Sierra Club or ACLU or a particular church
(?Maybe? not sure about this one) Many groups that are trying to coordinate their members to follow a particular person’s vision for coordinated action, e.g. Ikea’s or most other big companies’ interactions with their staff, or even a ~8-employee coffee shop that’s trying to realize a particular person’s vision
This seems right to me about most go clubs, but there’re a lot of other places that seem to me different on this axis.
Distinguishing features of Go clubs from my POV:
A rapid and trustworthy feedback loop, where everyone wins and loses at non-rigged games of Go regularly. (Opposite of schools proliferating without evidence.)
A lack of need to coordinate individuals. (People win or lose Go games on their own, rather than by needing to organize other people into coordinating their play.)
Some places where I expect “being in sync with the narrative” would diverge more from “just figuring out how to get stronger / how to do the object-level task in a general way”:
A hypothetical Go club that somehow twisted around to boost a famous player’s ego about how very useful his particular life-and-death problems were, or something, maybe so they could keep him around and brag about how they had him at their club, and so individual members could stay on his good side. (Doesn’t seem very likely, but it’s a thought experiment.)
Many groups with an “ideological” slant, e.g. the Sierra Club or ACLU or a particular church
(?Maybe? not sure about this one) Many groups that are trying to coordinate their members to follow a particular person’s vision for coordinated action, e.g. Ikea’s or most other big companies’ interactions with their staff, or even a ~8-employee coffee shop that’s trying to realize a particular person’s vision