I hope not to model LW after churches. The big difference is the monopolism of faith for the believing member. It would need some serious problems to make people fork of the current main line, but it does happen. Otherwise the one true church is a monopoly.
It might be interesting to explore the success rates of those who were not born into the church but choose it on their own.
For rationalist communities the barrier to fork of is pretty low. It will happen at some point, or maybe it already did. But the measurement of use is not the number of members, but the strength of the people that went through it’s training.
Anyone can take the content and ignore the community or pick and choose. Or keep a well liked belief but profit from the rest. With religions it is a package deal.
So long as a sufficient number of people are involved in the rationalist community for it to continue growing and innovating, I’m pretty okay with having other people using rationalist ideas and purposes to further their own goals, as long as they’re not destructive.
Though, if a person’s propensity to split is correlated with effectiveness, that would be bad.
I might have phrased it badly. I think I would enjoy a fork to some degree. The more obvious one being a rationalist group without all the ‘crazy’ transhuman and AI stuff. Or maybe around some base disagreement.
Sadly limited thought power can lead to all kinds of destructive purposes. But eitherway we should not assume that LW is already the best place there is.
In some ways, my ‘Insufficiently Awesome’ project is a fork. I’m going to be concentrating on community-building, helping people to become effective physically and socially, and most importantly having fun. I’m not ever going to be one of the ‘first-tier’ rationalists, and I view a contribution on the supporting side to be my most effective plan of action.
I’m not going to try to pull people away from LW. Instead, I’m going to try to form a group that is fun enough that people not already in LW join it, and possibly get interested in joining the main community.
I hope not to model LW after churches. The big difference is the monopolism of faith for the believing member. It would need some serious problems to make people fork of the current main line, but it does happen. Otherwise the one true church is a monopoly. It might be interesting to explore the success rates of those who were not born into the church but choose it on their own.
For rationalist communities the barrier to fork of is pretty low. It will happen at some point, or maybe it already did. But the measurement of use is not the number of members, but the strength of the people that went through it’s training. Anyone can take the content and ignore the community or pick and choose. Or keep a well liked belief but profit from the rest. With religions it is a package deal.
Is that a problem?
So long as a sufficient number of people are involved in the rationalist community for it to continue growing and innovating, I’m pretty okay with having other people using rationalist ideas and purposes to further their own goals, as long as they’re not destructive.
Though, if a person’s propensity to split is correlated with effectiveness, that would be bad.
I might have phrased it badly. I think I would enjoy a fork to some degree. The more obvious one being a rationalist group without all the ‘crazy’ transhuman and AI stuff. Or maybe around some base disagreement.
Sadly limited thought power can lead to all kinds of destructive purposes. But eitherway we should not assume that LW is already the best place there is.
In some ways, my ‘Insufficiently Awesome’ project is a fork. I’m going to be concentrating on community-building, helping people to become effective physically and socially, and most importantly having fun. I’m not ever going to be one of the ‘first-tier’ rationalists, and I view a contribution on the supporting side to be my most effective plan of action.
I’m not going to try to pull people away from LW. Instead, I’m going to try to form a group that is fun enough that people not already in LW join it, and possibly get interested in joining the main community.
Edit—please disregard this post