Rats and EAs should help with the sanity levels in other communities
Consider politics. You should take your political preferences/aesthetics, go to the tribes that are based on them, and help them be more sane. In the politics example, everyone’s favorite tribe has failure modes, and it is sort of the responsibility of the clearest-headed members of that tribe to make sure that those failure modes don’t become the dominant force of that tribe.
Speaking for myself, having been deeply in an activist tribe before I was a rat/EA, I regret I wasn’t there to help the value-aligned and clear-headed over the last few years while some of that tribe’s worst pathologies made gains. Now it seems almost too late for them.
Actionably, I want you to
Write for journals, forums, blogospheres, zines outside of rat and EA.
Dump time into tribes that might not be the state of the art in sanity, find the most sane people there, and find ways to support them.
I speak not (well, not entirely) from my cognitive dissonance at having abandoned an aesthetic I still have feelings for. I think
Tribes besides ours are what make up the overall sanity waterline
It’s ok to set aside humility and imposter syndrome and say “I can actionably be a resource of sanity for someone else”, even tho you personally think you have a lot of work to do at getting less wrong yourself. I would say the opposite of the “affix your mask before helping others” comic strip: find synergies between mentoring others in the art and continuing to master the art yourself.
We basically want every tribe to believe true things and think clearly about their values. Yes, I’m obviously concerned that this will lead to some of my fellow rats taking my advice, applying it to a political aesthetic I find barbaric, and helping that political aesthetic win—I think this concern is basically fine because on net I expect more true beliefs and clear thinking about values to make the meaning of winning for each tribe converge on something that isn’t zero-sum.
I should also mention that I expect an externality from this effort to be an increase in the intrarat / intraEA intellectual diversity.
Rats and EAs should help with the sanity levels in other communities
Consider politics. You should take your political preferences/aesthetics, go to the tribes that are based on them, and help them be more sane. In the politics example, everyone’s favorite tribe has failure modes, and it is sort of the responsibility of the clearest-headed members of that tribe to make sure that those failure modes don’t become the dominant force of that tribe.
Speaking for myself, having been deeply in an activist tribe before I was a rat/EA, I regret I wasn’t there to help the value-aligned and clear-headed over the last few years while some of that tribe’s worst pathologies made gains. Now it seems almost too late for them.
Actionably, I want you to
Write for journals, forums, blogospheres, zines outside of rat and EA.
Dump time into tribes that might not be the state of the art in sanity, find the most sane people there, and find ways to support them.
I speak not (well, not entirely) from my cognitive dissonance at having abandoned an aesthetic I still have feelings for. I think
Tribes besides ours are what make up the overall sanity waterline
It’s ok to set aside humility and imposter syndrome and say “I can actionably be a resource of sanity for someone else”, even tho you personally think you have a lot of work to do at getting less wrong yourself. I would say the opposite of the “affix your mask before helping others” comic strip: find synergies between mentoring others in the art and continuing to master the art yourself.
We basically want every tribe to believe true things and think clearly about their values. Yes, I’m obviously concerned that this will lead to some of my fellow rats taking my advice, applying it to a political aesthetic I find barbaric, and helping that political aesthetic win—I think this concern is basically fine because on net I expect more true beliefs and clear thinking about values to make the meaning of winning for each tribe converge on something that isn’t zero-sum.
I should also mention that I expect an externality from this effort to be an increase in the intrarat / intraEA intellectual diversity.
But what if that makes my tribe lose the political battle?
I mean, if rationality actually helped win political fights, by the power of evolution we already would have been all born rational...
1. Evolution does not magically get from A to B instantly.
2. Evolution does not necessarily care about X for many values of X.
This can include: winning political fights, whether or not nukes are built and many other things.