There’s a question of how the resources that result in an event get sourced.
The more resources people in a community have, the easier it is for them to run events that are free for the participants. The tech community has plenty of money and therefore many tech events are free.
A teacher of practical skills (“How to Change a Light Bulb 101”) may reasonably expect to be paid for their services. A purveyor of values (politics, religion, an academic field that claims to be purely descriptive but really isn’t, “good karma”, moralistic art, rationalist philosophy, etc.) should not.
If you categorically don’t pay people who are a purveyor of values, then you are declaring that you want that nobody is a purveyor of values as their full-time job.
If someone runs a libertarian think-tank, to spread libertarian values, they are usually funded through donations because someone considers it valuable to spread libertarian values instead of being paid by the audience of the think tank. That’s because there are libertarians who have money to spare and who value spreading libertarian values enough to donate to it.
It’s like whether or not a website is free or paid. Plenty of websites are free because they like an audience that watches the ads on the website. Many events that are about spreading values are free because they exist for making the audience believe those values.
To the extent that there’s value to having events by people who don’t organize them besides their full-time job but are more focused on creating those events and there’s no grant/donation money to run them, taking money for them allows the events to exist. I think there could be a lot of value generated by having more people organize valuable events and take money for them.
Checking people’s tickets during the events still sounds strange and suggests that there was in the event you are speaking about too much focus on money. It makes more sense to charge a price for admission, check at the entrance, and then leave the topic of money out of the actual event. Or alternatively, do it the way the church does and have no entrance fee and ask for donations during the event.
The more resources people in a community have, the easier it is for them to run events that are free for the participants. The tech community has plenty of money and therefore many tech events are free.
This applies to “top-down funded” events, like a networking thing held at some tech startup’s office, or a bunch of people having their travel expenses paid to attend a conference. There are different considerations with regard to ideological messages conveyed through such events (which I might get into in another post), but this is different from the central example of a “tech/finance/science bubble event” that I’m thinking of, which is “a bunch of people meeting in a cafe/bar/park”.
Or alternatively, do it the way the church does and have no entrance fee and ask for donations during the event.
I would indeed have found this less off-putting, though I’m not sure exactly why.
If you categorically don’t pay people who are a purveyor of values, then you are declaring that you want that nobody is a purveyor of values as their full-time job.
Would this really be a bad thing? The current situation seems like a defect/defect equilibrium—I want there to be full-time advocates for Good Values, but only to counteract all the other full-time advocates for Bad Values. It would be better if we could just agree to ratchet down the ideological arms race so that we can spend our time on more productive, non-zero-sum activities.
But unlike soldiers in a literal arms race, value-purveyors (“preachers” for short) only have what power we give them. A world where full-time preachers are ipso facto regarded as untrustworthy seems more achievable than one in which we all magically agree to dismantle our militaries.
I think there could be a lot of value generated by having more people organize valuable events and take money for them.
Perhaps, but this positive value will be more than counteracted by the negative value generated by Bad-Values-havers also organizing more events.
This intuitively seems true to me, but may not be obvious. It’s based on the assumption that some attributes of an ideology (e.g. the presence of sincere advocates) are relatively more truth-correlated than other attributes (e.g. the profitability of events). Therefore, increasing the weight with which these more-truth-correlated attributes contribute to swaying public opinion, and decreasing the weight of less-truth-correlated attributes, will tend to promote the truth winning out.
(I have more points to add, but I’ll do that in another comment.)
If ideologies would be just about I’m for the blue tribe or I’m for the red tribe, then there would be a zero-sum.
I do believe that progress often arises dialectically. For that, it’s useful if both sides develop deep arguments.
For both the rationality community and the new agey community where a lot of different ideas are developed I find it strange to think in terms of zero-sum because rationality is a lot more than just self-identifying as belonging to the rationality tribe. I like the new agey people who deeply practice some skill a lot more than new agey people for whom it’s just shallow tribe membership.
Agreed. People trying to purvey values don’t only spread values; they also make factual claims, and in so doing help bring light to facts that people holding different values would like to ignore or minimize as inconvenient for their claims.
There’s a question of how the resources that result in an event get sourced.
The more resources people in a community have, the easier it is for them to run events that are free for the participants. The tech community has plenty of money and therefore many tech events are free.
If you categorically don’t pay people who are a purveyor of values, then you are declaring that you want that nobody is a purveyor of values as their full-time job.
If someone runs a libertarian think-tank, to spread libertarian values, they are usually funded through donations because someone considers it valuable to spread libertarian values instead of being paid by the audience of the think tank. That’s because there are libertarians who have money to spare and who value spreading libertarian values enough to donate to it.
It’s like whether or not a website is free or paid. Plenty of websites are free because they like an audience that watches the ads on the website. Many events that are about spreading values are free because they exist for making the audience believe those values.
To the extent that there’s value to having events by people who don’t organize them besides their full-time job but are more focused on creating those events and there’s no grant/donation money to run them, taking money for them allows the events to exist. I think there could be a lot of value generated by having more people organize valuable events and take money for them.
Checking people’s tickets during the events still sounds strange and suggests that there was in the event you are speaking about too much focus on money. It makes more sense to charge a price for admission, check at the entrance, and then leave the topic of money out of the actual event. Or alternatively, do it the way the church does and have no entrance fee and ask for donations during the event.
This applies to “top-down funded” events, like a networking thing held at some tech startup’s office, or a bunch of people having their travel expenses paid to attend a conference. There are different considerations with regard to ideological messages conveyed through such events (which I might get into in another post), but this is different from the central example of a “tech/finance/science bubble event” that I’m thinking of, which is “a bunch of people meeting in a cafe/bar/park”.
I would indeed have found this less off-putting, though I’m not sure exactly why.
Would this really be a bad thing? The current situation seems like a defect/defect equilibrium—I want there to be full-time advocates for Good Values, but only to counteract all the other full-time advocates for Bad Values. It would be better if we could just agree to ratchet down the ideological arms race so that we can spend our time on more productive, non-zero-sum activities.
But unlike soldiers in a literal arms race, value-purveyors (“preachers” for short) only have what power we give them. A world where full-time preachers are ipso facto regarded as untrustworthy seems more achievable than one in which we all magically agree to dismantle our militaries.
Perhaps, but this positive value will be more than counteracted by the negative value generated by Bad-Values-havers also organizing more events.
This intuitively seems true to me, but may not be obvious. It’s based on the assumption that some attributes of an ideology (e.g. the presence of sincere advocates) are relatively more truth-correlated than other attributes (e.g. the profitability of events). Therefore, increasing the weight with which these more-truth-correlated attributes contribute to swaying public opinion, and decreasing the weight of less-truth-correlated attributes, will tend to promote the truth winning out.
(I have more points to add, but I’ll do that in another comment.)
If ideologies would be just about I’m for the blue tribe or I’m for the red tribe, then there would be a zero-sum.
I do believe that progress often arises dialectically. For that, it’s useful if both sides develop deep arguments.
For both the rationality community and the new agey community where a lot of different ideas are developed I find it strange to think in terms of zero-sum because rationality is a lot more than just self-identifying as belonging to the rationality tribe. I like the new agey people who deeply practice some skill a lot more than new agey people for whom it’s just shallow tribe membership.
Agreed. People trying to purvey values don’t only spread values; they also make factual claims, and in so doing help bring light to facts that people holding different values would like to ignore or minimize as inconvenient for their claims.