Is your goal to have a small community of friends or to take over the world? The tightest-knit religions are the smaller and weirder ones, so if you want stronger social bonds you should join Scientology and not the Catholic church.
Or, you know, you can just go to a LessWrong meetup. I’ve been to one yesterday: we had cake, and wine, and we did a double crux discussion about rationality and self-improvement. I dare say that we’re getting at least half as much community benefit as the average church-goer, all for a modest investment of effort and without sacrificing our sanity.
If someone doesn’t have a social life because don’t leave their house, they should leave their house. The religious shut-ins who read the Bible for fun aren’t getting much social benefit either.
One day I will have to write a longer text about this, but shortly: it is a false dilemma to see “small and tight-knit community” and “taking over the world” as mutually exclusive. Catholic church is not a small community, but it contains many small communities. It is an “eukaryotic” community, containing both the tight-knit subgroups and the masses of lukewarm believers, which together contribute to its long-term survival.
I would like to see the rationalist community to become “eukaryotic” in a similar way. In certain ways it already happens: we have people who work at MIRI and CFAR, we have people who participate at local meetups, we have people who debate online. This diversity is strength, not weakness: if you only have one mode of participation, then people who are unable to participate in that one specific way, are lost to the community.
The tricky part is keeping it all together. Preventing the tight-knit groups from excommunicating everyone else as “not real members”, but also preventing the lukewarm members from making it all about social interaction and abandoning the original purpose, because both of those are natural human tendencies.
I imagine this could be tricky to research even if people wouldn’t try to obfuscate the reality (which they of course will). It would be difficult to distinguish “these two people conspired together” from “they are two extremely smart people, living in the same city, of course they are likely to have met each other”.
For example, in a small country with maybe five elite high schools, elite people of the same age have high probability to have been high-school classmates. If they later take over the world together, it would make a good story to claim that they already conspired to do that during the high school. Even if the real idea only came 20 years later, no one would believe it after some journalist finds out that actually they are former classmates.
So the information is likely to be skewed in both ways: not seeing connections where they are, and seeing meaningful connections in mere coincidences.
Small groups have a bigger problem: they won’t be very well documented. As far as I know, the only major source on the Junto is Ben Franklin’s autobiography, which I’ve already read.
Large groups, of course, have an entirely different problem: if they get an appreciable amount of power, conspiracy theorists will probably find out, and put out reams of garbage on them. I haven’t started trying to look into the history of the Freemasons yet because I’m not sure about the difficulty of telling garbage from useful history.
Is your goal to have a small community of friends or to take over the world? The tightest-knit religions are the smaller and weirder ones, so if you want stronger social bonds you should join Scientology and not the Catholic church.
Or, you know, you can just go to a LessWrong meetup. I’ve been to one yesterday: we had cake, and wine, and we did a double crux discussion about rationality and self-improvement. I dare say that we’re getting at least half as much community benefit as the average church-goer, all for a modest investment of effort and without sacrificing our sanity.
If someone doesn’t have a social life because don’t leave their house, they should leave their house. The religious shut-ins who read the Bible for fun aren’t getting much social benefit either.
Rationality is a bad religion, but if you understand religions well enough you probably don’t need one.
One day I will have to write a longer text about this, but shortly: it is a false dilemma to see “small and tight-knit community” and “taking over the world” as mutually exclusive. Catholic church is not a small community, but it contains many small communities. It is an “eukaryotic” community, containing both the tight-knit subgroups and the masses of lukewarm believers, which together contribute to its long-term survival.
I would like to see the rationalist community to become “eukaryotic” in a similar way. In certain ways it already happens: we have people who work at MIRI and CFAR, we have people who participate at local meetups, we have people who debate online. This diversity is strength, not weakness: if you only have one mode of participation, then people who are unable to participate in that one specific way, are lost to the community.
The tricky part is keeping it all together. Preventing the tight-knit groups from excommunicating everyone else as “not real members”, but also preventing the lukewarm members from making it all about social interaction and abandoning the original purpose, because both of those are natural human tendencies.
One thing I’d like to see is more research into the effects of… if not secret societies, then at least societies of some sort.
For example, is it just a coincidence that Thiel and Musk, arguably the two most interesting public figures in the tech scene, are both Paypal Mafia?
Another good example is the Junto.
I imagine this could be tricky to research even if people wouldn’t try to obfuscate the reality (which they of course will). It would be difficult to distinguish “these two people conspired together” from “they are two extremely smart people, living in the same city, of course they are likely to have met each other”.
For example, in a small country with maybe five elite high schools, elite people of the same age have high probability to have been high-school classmates. If they later take over the world together, it would make a good story to claim that they already conspired to do that during the high school. Even if the real idea only came 20 years later, no one would believe it after some journalist finds out that actually they are former classmates.
So the information is likely to be skewed in both ways: not seeing connections where they are, and seeing meaningful connections in mere coincidences.
Small groups have a bigger problem: they won’t be very well documented. As far as I know, the only major source on the Junto is Ben Franklin’s autobiography, which I’ve already read.
Large groups, of course, have an entirely different problem: if they get an appreciable amount of power, conspiracy theorists will probably find out, and put out reams of garbage on them. I haven’t started trying to look into the history of the Freemasons yet because I’m not sure about the difficulty of telling garbage from useful history.