(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 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!