This is too interesting topic to be hidden deep inside a comment thread to an article with different topic. Some random thoughts here:
I would like to have more data about poly relationships. I don’t have an example in my neighborhood, and even if I had, I wouldn’t want to build my statistic on a single data point. And even if I found dozen examples now, I could only observe how they are now, not what happens in long term. (If I were 20, I could start poly dating and get data experimentally, but I am almost 40 now, so this doesn’t seem like a good area for experimenting.) I would love to see an analysis by someone who is not a polyamory enthusiast, but who has observed many poly relationships in long term, has some statistics, and can compare them with mono statistics. For example, whether divorces in poly community are on average more or less civilized than in mono community.
What exactly happens in a relationship, depends not only on its formal structure, but very much on the personalities of people involved. If we use monogamous relationships as a more familiar model, some relationships are awesome, and some relationships are horrible. Generally, marriage is considered more serious than dating, but there is also a variance; some people take their dating more seriously than other people take their marriage. Shorty: mono relationships are different. I expect the same for poly relationships. If a polyamorous group contains some horrible people, I would expect horrible results; but that’s not an argument against polyamory. (Perhaps in a statistical sense: a larger group has a greater chance to contain a horrible person. But maybe it is easier for the other people to send the horrible person way: they will not remain alone if they do. But maybe it is more difficult to coordinate more people. Again, not enough data.)
Like army1987 said, different environments have different proportions of evil people. If you experienced only one, it seems like the whole world is the same. Even having experienced two or three different situations doesn’t mean they weren’t of the same type. Sometimes our experiences and habits are holding us at the same situation. For example, a person who was abused in previous relationships may ignore obvious (for other people) red flags in the next relationship, simply because they believe that this is how all people behave. A person who had a shitty job experience may also walk straightly into another shitty job, because they believe this is how all jobs are. We don’t have other people’s data to compare: first, it is difficult to communicate because different people will use the same words to describe different things; second: we are more likely to talk with people who are in a similar situation.
It seems to me that we (people in general) would have less problems with sociopaths, if we communicated better. My experience with people who seemed like sociopaths was that they actively discouraged communication and honesty among other people around them; thus the non-sociopaths couldn’t share their stories and possibly coordinate against the sociopath. I am not saying that more communication would solve everything: sociopaths can lie and manipulate. Just that it is even easier to manipulate if people don’t share their data. The sociopath can simply use the same algorithm on many people in row, not afraid that their strategy will be exposed. (“He did this to me.” “Oh, he did exactly the same thing to me.” “Really? Now I am curious: based on your experience, what exactly will he do if this hapens?” “He will simply tell that you lied, you will have no proof, and you know how charming he is.” “Well, now that you have warned me, I actually could obtain a proof...”)
Reading your comment, I get a feeling that you didn’t have the luck to find a nice community of people. Perhaps nice individuals, but not a “tribe”. I wish I could help you, but I probably can’t. I know a few nice groups around me; LW is my favourite becase it is “nice and not stupid”, but if one doesn’t insist on rationality too much, there are other nice groups, too. I will not recommend you to try LW, first because that would feel cultish, and second because I can’t vouch for LW fans in a different country. A more general algorithm could be: look at non-profit organizations around you, there should be people who want to make world a better place. Although, there are also many bad apples. So perhaps an actionable plan would be: pick dozen non-profit organizations around you, meet them all and ask if they need little help (many non-profits do). With some luck, you could find many nice people this way.
didn’t have the luck to find a nice community of people. Perhaps nice individuals, but not a “tribe”
I wish I could up-vote this whole comment more, and especially this line. I agree with your points and it’d be interesting to see a top-level post about this.
You’re right; I don’t feel like part of a “tribe” now, though I have some good friends/family, and it comes through in my writing. There are a few genuinely nice tribes I could join (by helping/entertaining tribe members to build reciprocity, and signaling belonging with my style choices), and I should prioritize this for sanity’s sake. Ideally, I would find a tribe of smart and well-adjusted people who want to try to not die, i.e. try to get rich and then make the needed science happen. There are only a few people interested in this project, though, and they tend to be crazy, making forming such a tribe near-impossible. Joining a tribe that values being a good person and enjoying cultured recreation (and avoiding depressive patterns of thinking about how all conventional roads lead to death) is probably a good way to go. This is a strange game we all are playing, where only the meaningless rules are clearly written.
(This could be just a hindsight reasoning, but the fact that you wrote this article is an evidence for not having the tribe—otherwise you probably would have discussed the topic with your tribe, and got to some satisfactory conclusion, instead of asking us to defend ourselves.)
Having a tribe that shares at least some of your values is very good for mental health. I used to be in a tribe of smart religious people, with whom I could reasonably debate about many things (at the cost of silently suffering when they tried to apply similar reasoning to some supernatural topic, which fortunately didn’t happen too often). I also was in a tribe of people interested in psychology, which later mostly fell apart, but some people stil see each other once in a while. Then I had a few friends to talk about programming, or other specialized topics. Also, when I had a girlfriend, we shared some interests.
This was all nice, but there was this… compartmentalization. I knew I can debate a topic X only in a group A, a topic Y only in a group B, and a topic Z nowhere. Sometimes merely because they wouldn’t be interested in a topic, but sometimes the topic would go directly against the values of the group. (You can’t debate atheism with religious people, or skepticism with people who believe that “positive thinking” is the answer to everything and that reality is only as much real as you believe it to be.) Or perhaps I wanted to put two ideas together, like self-improvementand rationality, but I only knew people interested in self-improvement through irrational means, or in the kind of skepticism that opposed any desire for self-improvement as naiveté. Or I wanted to become more rational, in everything, consistently, as a lifestyle, and people just didn’t understand why or how. So I felt like my mind was cut to multiple aspects, some of them acceptable in some groups, some of them acceptable nowhere. And it seemed like the best thing I could realistically have, and that perhaps I should stop being unrealistic and be happy with what is realistically possible.
Then I found LessWrong, but which I mean I’ve read the Sequences, and I was like: “Oh, great! I am not insane. There are people with similar ideas.” And then I was like: “Oh, fuck! They are on the other side of the planet.” Then, I think I realized Eliezer’s strategy… instead of talking with hundreds of people and trying to find the few compatible ones, he wrote a blog, and let the compatible people contact him. So I was like: Okay, I can try the same thing; and the advantage is I can simply translate Eliezer’s texts and publish them in my blog. Well, after two years and over thousand pages translated… I have found less than a dozen of such people. Luckily, another dozen is at Vienna, one hour of travel from my home. This is what I consider my tribe now. But since I see them once in a month, I still have enough time left for non-rationalists. -- There is this little problem with this internet strategy: many people who are active on internet, are not active anywhere else. For example, I wrote an article about LW that 6000 people read, and 1000 of them “liked” it; my estimate is that 200-300 of them should live in my city, and yet, there was not a single new person at our next meetup. (I didn’t expect hundreds, but two or three would have been nice.)
I don’t have a tribe-building strategy. If I had, I would definitely use it. (There are a few things I haven’t tried yet, such as using HP:MoR as a recruitment tool.) But maybe, if finding a tribe with your values is high priority for you, you could start blogging about things you value… and then other people will be happy to meet you. When you will have enough people commenting on your blog, you can just announce once in a month that at some given time you will be in a cafe and they are free to join you.
Sometimes the important things are difficult to express.
there was this… compartmentalization...And it seemed like the best thing I could realistically have
Exactly! I tend to affiliate with different friends/groups for different reasons. It tends to be easier to find friends for normal, low-risk goals (living well, studying) than for weird, high-risk goals (getting very rich, ending death), and with any friend there tends to be points of disagreement. My understanding is this is a challenge for most adult city-dwellers.
One other approach (also implemeted by EY) is to slowly change his friends’ beliefs to more closely agree with his own.
If the goal is simply acceptance, a successful strategy seems to be to use higher status/value in some areas to make up for a tendency to share “weird” thoughts in other areas. In other words, attract friends who will acknowledge and support the rationalist self-improvement even though they don’t take that path themselves, by providing value/fun/leadership in other areas.
This is too interesting topic to be hidden deep inside a comment thread to an article with different topic. Some random thoughts here:
I would like to have more data about poly relationships. I don’t have an example in my neighborhood, and even if I had, I wouldn’t want to build my statistic on a single data point. And even if I found dozen examples now, I could only observe how they are now, not what happens in long term. (If I were 20, I could start poly dating and get data experimentally, but I am almost 40 now, so this doesn’t seem like a good area for experimenting.) I would love to see an analysis by someone who is not a polyamory enthusiast, but who has observed many poly relationships in long term, has some statistics, and can compare them with mono statistics. For example, whether divorces in poly community are on average more or less civilized than in mono community.
What exactly happens in a relationship, depends not only on its formal structure, but very much on the personalities of people involved. If we use monogamous relationships as a more familiar model, some relationships are awesome, and some relationships are horrible. Generally, marriage is considered more serious than dating, but there is also a variance; some people take their dating more seriously than other people take their marriage. Shorty: mono relationships are different. I expect the same for poly relationships. If a polyamorous group contains some horrible people, I would expect horrible results; but that’s not an argument against polyamory. (Perhaps in a statistical sense: a larger group has a greater chance to contain a horrible person. But maybe it is easier for the other people to send the horrible person way: they will not remain alone if they do. But maybe it is more difficult to coordinate more people. Again, not enough data.)
Like army1987 said, different environments have different proportions of evil people. If you experienced only one, it seems like the whole world is the same. Even having experienced two or three different situations doesn’t mean they weren’t of the same type. Sometimes our experiences and habits are holding us at the same situation. For example, a person who was abused in previous relationships may ignore obvious (for other people) red flags in the next relationship, simply because they believe that this is how all people behave. A person who had a shitty job experience may also walk straightly into another shitty job, because they believe this is how all jobs are. We don’t have other people’s data to compare: first, it is difficult to communicate because different people will use the same words to describe different things; second: we are more likely to talk with people who are in a similar situation.
It seems to me that we (people in general) would have less problems with sociopaths, if we communicated better. My experience with people who seemed like sociopaths was that they actively discouraged communication and honesty among other people around them; thus the non-sociopaths couldn’t share their stories and possibly coordinate against the sociopath. I am not saying that more communication would solve everything: sociopaths can lie and manipulate. Just that it is even easier to manipulate if people don’t share their data. The sociopath can simply use the same algorithm on many people in row, not afraid that their strategy will be exposed. (“He did this to me.” “Oh, he did exactly the same thing to me.” “Really? Now I am curious: based on your experience, what exactly will he do if this hapens?” “He will simply tell that you lied, you will have no proof, and you know how charming he is.” “Well, now that you have warned me, I actually could obtain a proof...”)
Reading your comment, I get a feeling that you didn’t have the luck to find a nice community of people. Perhaps nice individuals, but not a “tribe”. I wish I could help you, but I probably can’t. I know a few nice groups around me; LW is my favourite becase it is “nice and not stupid”, but if one doesn’t insist on rationality too much, there are other nice groups, too. I will not recommend you to try LW, first because that would feel cultish, and second because I can’t vouch for LW fans in a different country. A more general algorithm could be: look at non-profit organizations around you, there should be people who want to make world a better place. Although, there are also many bad apples. So perhaps an actionable plan would be: pick dozen non-profit organizations around you, meet them all and ask if they need little help (many non-profits do). With some luck, you could find many nice people this way.
I wish I could up-vote this whole comment more, and especially this line. I agree with your points and it’d be interesting to see a top-level post about this.
You’re right; I don’t feel like part of a “tribe” now, though I have some good friends/family, and it comes through in my writing. There are a few genuinely nice tribes I could join (by helping/entertaining tribe members to build reciprocity, and signaling belonging with my style choices), and I should prioritize this for sanity’s sake. Ideally, I would find a tribe of smart and well-adjusted people who want to try to not die, i.e. try to get rich and then make the needed science happen. There are only a few people interested in this project, though, and they tend to be crazy, making forming such a tribe near-impossible. Joining a tribe that values being a good person and enjoying cultured recreation (and avoiding depressive patterns of thinking about how all conventional roads lead to death) is probably a good way to go. This is a strange game we all are playing, where only the meaningless rules are clearly written.
(This could be just a hindsight reasoning, but the fact that you wrote this article is an evidence for not having the tribe—otherwise you probably would have discussed the topic with your tribe, and got to some satisfactory conclusion, instead of asking us to defend ourselves.)
Having a tribe that shares at least some of your values is very good for mental health. I used to be in a tribe of smart religious people, with whom I could reasonably debate about many things (at the cost of silently suffering when they tried to apply similar reasoning to some supernatural topic, which fortunately didn’t happen too often). I also was in a tribe of people interested in psychology, which later mostly fell apart, but some people stil see each other once in a while. Then I had a few friends to talk about programming, or other specialized topics. Also, when I had a girlfriend, we shared some interests.
This was all nice, but there was this… compartmentalization. I knew I can debate a topic X only in a group A, a topic Y only in a group B, and a topic Z nowhere. Sometimes merely because they wouldn’t be interested in a topic, but sometimes the topic would go directly against the values of the group. (You can’t debate atheism with religious people, or skepticism with people who believe that “positive thinking” is the answer to everything and that reality is only as much real as you believe it to be.) Or perhaps I wanted to put two ideas together, like self-improvement and rationality, but I only knew people interested in self-improvement through irrational means, or in the kind of skepticism that opposed any desire for self-improvement as naiveté. Or I wanted to become more rational, in everything, consistently, as a lifestyle, and people just didn’t understand why or how. So I felt like my mind was cut to multiple aspects, some of them acceptable in some groups, some of them acceptable nowhere. And it seemed like the best thing I could realistically have, and that perhaps I should stop being unrealistic and be happy with what is realistically possible.
Then I found LessWrong, but which I mean I’ve read the Sequences, and I was like: “Oh, great! I am not insane. There are people with similar ideas.” And then I was like: “Oh, fuck! They are on the other side of the planet.” Then, I think I realized Eliezer’s strategy… instead of talking with hundreds of people and trying to find the few compatible ones, he wrote a blog, and let the compatible people contact him. So I was like: Okay, I can try the same thing; and the advantage is I can simply translate Eliezer’s texts and publish them in my blog. Well, after two years and over thousand pages translated… I have found less than a dozen of such people. Luckily, another dozen is at Vienna, one hour of travel from my home. This is what I consider my tribe now. But since I see them once in a month, I still have enough time left for non-rationalists. -- There is this little problem with this internet strategy: many people who are active on internet, are not active anywhere else. For example, I wrote an article about LW that 6000 people read, and 1000 of them “liked” it; my estimate is that 200-300 of them should live in my city, and yet, there was not a single new person at our next meetup. (I didn’t expect hundreds, but two or three would have been nice.)
I don’t have a tribe-building strategy. If I had, I would definitely use it. (There are a few things I haven’t tried yet, such as using HP:MoR as a recruitment tool.) But maybe, if finding a tribe with your values is high priority for you, you could start blogging about things you value… and then other people will be happy to meet you. When you will have enough people commenting on your blog, you can just announce once in a month that at some given time you will be in a cafe and they are free to join you.
Sometimes the important things are difficult to express.
Exactly! I tend to affiliate with different friends/groups for different reasons. It tends to be easier to find friends for normal, low-risk goals (living well, studying) than for weird, high-risk goals (getting very rich, ending death), and with any friend there tends to be points of disagreement. My understanding is this is a challenge for most adult city-dwellers.
One other approach (also implemeted by EY) is to slowly change his friends’ beliefs to more closely agree with his own.
If the goal is simply acceptance, a successful strategy seems to be to use higher status/value in some areas to make up for a tendency to share “weird” thoughts in other areas. In other words, attract friends who will acknowledge and support the rationalist self-improvement even though they don’t take that path themselves, by providing value/fun/leadership in other areas.
Good luck with the meetups/tribe!