I think I’m still having trouble visualising what it would be like to be part of your community.
In terms of living under my iron fist, I’m aiming to occuply a position thats more like “older brother” than “Big Brother”. Duncan’s approach of middleschool teacher turned military instructor doesn’t really appeal to me. I’m trying to balance the ability to have banter as peers while being able to take charge when the situation calls for it, and so far there have been very few problems with that to my knowledge.
A few features that set us apart is that we’ve mostly made peace with the idea that things are going to be a work in progress, and we aren’t saying “we can deliver the goods 100% of the time” but “we’re giving things a shot, and if things work, great, and if not, we all still learn something” as such, we’ve been prepared to do things like announce n=1 interventions that we think might work, but won’t necessarily, and we aren’t too worried about looking informal and cobbled together, as that’s essentially what we are at the moment. (e.g. this amazingly kludged but still verifiable way to pre-register an experiment prior to a central rationalist database existing for doing so)
As you like your startup analogy, I feel compelled to ask, “What is your plan to scale?”
The startup analogy is appropriate in some places, but not others. When scaling something that has almost zero marginal cost of production, you can scale exponentially. Offline communities have much lower returns to scale (nor do we need to scale. We aren’t aiming for an IPO, going beyond 1000 “users” is of little utility to us)
In terms of the logistics of scaling, a house is currently in the process of being bought, and is intended to serve as a social hub, with rented grouphouses surrounding it, as this arrangement allows us to make the most efficient use of the capital available to us.
I think scale in this case would be, “spread the knowledge you have acquired so that other people can replicate it” rather than physically scale the number of people in the houses. So the equivalent of franchise scaling, but fun. I hope you see the utility in having other sets of people trying similar things and contributing to a shared knowledge base (such as the experiment database you mentioned).
In terms of living under my iron fist, I’m aiming to occuply a position thats more like “older brother” than “Big Brother”. Duncan’s approach of middleschool teacher turned military instructor doesn’t really appeal to me. I’m trying to balance the ability to have banter as peers while being able to take charge when the situation calls for it, and so far there have been very few problems with that to my knowledge.
A few features that set us apart is that we’ve mostly made peace with the idea that things are going to be a work in progress, and we aren’t saying “we can deliver the goods 100% of the time” but “we’re giving things a shot, and if things work, great, and if not, we all still learn something” as such, we’ve been prepared to do things like announce n=1 interventions that we think might work, but won’t necessarily, and we aren’t too worried about looking informal and cobbled together, as that’s essentially what we are at the moment. (e.g. this amazingly kludged but still verifiable way to pre-register an experiment prior to a central rationalist database existing for doing so)
The startup analogy is appropriate in some places, but not others. When scaling something that has almost zero marginal cost of production, you can scale exponentially. Offline communities have much lower returns to scale (nor do we need to scale. We aren’t aiming for an IPO, going beyond 1000 “users” is of little utility to us)
In terms of the logistics of scaling, a house is currently in the process of being bought, and is intended to serve as a social hub, with rented grouphouses surrounding it, as this arrangement allows us to make the most efficient use of the capital available to us.
I think scale in this case would be, “spread the knowledge you have acquired so that other people can replicate it” rather than physically scale the number of people in the houses. So the equivalent of franchise scaling, but fun. I hope you see the utility in having other sets of people trying similar things and contributing to a shared knowledge base (such as the experiment database you mentioned).