Some alternate frames on all this, to help hedge against the “did Ray just anchor the whole discussion with the wrong frame?” possibility.
Professional / Non-Community
Epistemic professional peers
I was recently reading “How to Measure Anything”, a book which AFAICT predates and is unentangled with LessWrong. HTMA is very straightforward and professional/academic – here are a series of tools for how to employ bayesian epistemology on real world projects with high stakes and murky territory.
The book gave me glimpse of an alternate world that could be (and perhaps is?) where there’s not much oriented around “community”, except insofar as most academic and professional disciplines have communities.
Professional Effective Altruism
The reason “professional bayesianism” doesn’t feel sufficient to me is that it doesn’t actually make sure the hard problems in the world get addressed. It actually requires not merely intellectual tools but a comprehensive worldview, deep models and goal-driven network to accomplish them.
On one hand, this doesn’t need to be any more “community” like than working at Google (or perhaps a level up, Alphabet). On the other hand, Google seems to invest huge amounts of effort into making sure they have a good internal community.
In both lenses, individual organizations may make an effort to meet people’s needs, but it probably won’t do the “someone brings you soup if you’re sick” thing.
The University
When chatting with Habryka, his alternate frame was more like an idealized university. There are very clear gatekeeping mechanisms for getting in (perhaps you pay money, perhaps you have to apply and meet some bar). Once in, you’re there to study for a few years. There are many branching pathways of things to learn, and then there are many opportunities to self-organize into clubs, fraternities, etc.
There’s an expectation that eventually you move on to some professional organization, or possibly moving into something like academia where you just figure things out without a direct profit goal.
In Habryka’s frame, as I understand it (yo habryka feel free to write a version of this that articulates it better. :P), the University is Mission-Aligned. The official curriculum is of the form “study the particular disciplines you need to make serious progress on the Mission”. There are various clubs that range from Mission-adjaecent (like Model UN) or random theater / craft / cultural clubs.
The Church and the Bulletin Board
Another subtly alternate frame from Village is Church.
“Village” vaguely implies that the primary connection is geographic and economic. To some extent, people trust each other because if people aren’t literally plowing fields and blacksmithing and what-not, the village starves in the winter.
“Church” is something that can continues to succeed even in a large town or city where people come and go more easily (although I’m not confident this is a stable arrangement – once you have large cities, atomic individualism and the gradual erosion of Church might be inevitable)
To be a member of a church, you are expected to tithe, and to show up at mass every Sunday. You listen to sermons that establish common knowledge of what your people do-and-don’t-do. You recite words that most likely have some affect on your psychology even if you don’t literally believe them.
The church is designed to scale – large numbers of people in pews facing a single priest. (There are alternate arrangements like pagan circles that don’t scale as well that require higher skill on the part of participants). A crowd of people, many of whom haven’t met, can participate, without newbies messing anything up.
During church, people who are going through hard times, or who have passed particular milestones, are mentioned and prayed for.
Once you get inside the church, there is a bulletin board, that includes a bunch of activities like soup kitchen volunteer, bible study, choir practice, and maybe less relevant things like bingo night. Many of these provide sub-communities that are easy to get involved but require real work and commitment to excel at.
If you are sick, or recently had a funeral, someone literally brings you soup.
There is a natural “minimum membership” (wherein you get soup if you’re sick, but aren’t necessarily high status), and the cost for that is 10% of your income and a whole lot of time. I’m guessing (but am not confident, I’ve never been to church for an extended period) that there is additional belonging/social-support/power that you get if you prove yourself a useful and/or fun member of the community.
I would like to have a community that strives to be rational also “outside the lab”. The words “professional bayesianism” feel like bayesianism within the lab. (I haven’t read the book, so perhaps I am misinterpreting the author’s intent.)
Google seems to invest huge amounts of effort into making sure they have a good internal community.
That’s nice, but ultimately, if there is a tension between “what is better for you” and “what is better for Google”, Google will probably choose the latter. What could possibly be good for you but bad for Google? Thinking for less than one minute I’d say: becoming financially independent, so you no longer have to work; building your own startup; finding a spouse, having kids, and refusing to work overtime...
Yeah, this is a fully general argument against any society, but it seems to me that a Village, simply by not being profit oriented, would have greater freedom to optimize for the benefit of its members. For a business company, every employer is a cost. In a village, well-behaving citizens pay their own bills, and provide some value to each other, whether that value is greater or smaller, it is still positive or zero.
“Church” is something that can continues to succeed even in a large town or city where people come and go more easily (although I’m not confident this is a stable arrangement – once you have large cities, atomic individualism and the gradual erosion of Church might be inevitable)
An important part of being in the Church is being physically present at its religious activities, e.g. every Sunday morning. So even if you happen to be surrounded mostly by non-believers in your city, at least once in a week you become physically surrounded by believers. (A temporary Village.) Physical proximity creates the kind of emotions that internet cannot substitute.
Church is an “eukaryotic” organization: it has a boundary on the outside (believers vs non-believers), but also inside (clergy vs lay members). This slows down value shift: you can accept many believers, while only worrying about value alignment of the clergy: potential heretical opinions of the lay members are just their personal opinions, not the official teaching; if necessary, the clergy will make this clear in a coordinated way. Having stronger filter in the inner boundary allows you to have weaker filter on the outer boundary, because there is no democracy in the outer circle.
Translated to the language of the article: Mission can have multiple Villages, but Village can only have one Mission. As an example, if meditation becomes popular among some rationalists, and they start going to Buddhist retreats and hanging out with Buddhist, and then they bring their nerdy Buddhist friends to rationality meetups… it should be clear that the rationalist community is in absolutely no risk of becoming a religious community, because the mysterious bullshit of Buddhism will be rejected (at least by the inner circle) just like the mysterious bullshit of any other religion. Similarly when people will try to conquer the rationalist community for their political faction; but I believe we are doing quite well here.
You listen to sermons that establish common knowledge of what your people do-and-don’t-do.
The important thing here is that the sermons come from the top. They do not represent the latest fashionable contrarian opinion. The Church provides many things for its members, but freedom to give sermons is not one of them.
(To avoid misunderstanding: I am not praising dictatorship for the dictatorship’s sake here. Rather, it is my experience from various projects, that there is a type of people who come to introduce controversy, but don’t contribute to the core mission. These people will cause drama, and provide nothing useful in return. If they win, they will only keep pushing further; if they lose, they will ragequit and maybe spend some time slandering you. It is nice to have a mechanism that stops them at the door. Even more importantly in a group that attracts so many contrarians, and where “hey, you call yourselves ‘rationalists’, but you irrationally refuse my opinion before you spent thousand hours debating it thoroughly?!” is a powerful argument. The sermons are a tool of coordination, and coordination is hard.)
Some alternate frames on all this, to help hedge against the “did Ray just anchor the whole discussion with the wrong frame?” possibility.
Professional / Non-Community
Epistemic professional peers
I was recently reading “How to Measure Anything”, a book which AFAICT predates and is unentangled with LessWrong. HTMA is very straightforward and professional/academic – here are a series of tools for how to employ bayesian epistemology on real world projects with high stakes and murky territory.
The book gave me glimpse of an alternate world that could be (and perhaps is?) where there’s not much oriented around “community”, except insofar as most academic and professional disciplines have communities.
Professional Effective Altruism
The reason “professional bayesianism” doesn’t feel sufficient to me is that it doesn’t actually make sure the hard problems in the world get addressed. It actually requires not merely intellectual tools but a comprehensive worldview, deep models and goal-driven network to accomplish them.
On one hand, this doesn’t need to be any more “community” like than working at Google (or perhaps a level up, Alphabet). On the other hand, Google seems to invest huge amounts of effort into making sure they have a good internal community.
In both lenses, individual organizations may make an effort to meet people’s needs, but it probably won’t do the “someone brings you soup if you’re sick” thing.
The University
When chatting with Habryka, his alternate frame was more like an idealized university. There are very clear gatekeeping mechanisms for getting in (perhaps you pay money, perhaps you have to apply and meet some bar). Once in, you’re there to study for a few years. There are many branching pathways of things to learn, and then there are many opportunities to self-organize into clubs, fraternities, etc.
There’s an expectation that eventually you move on to some professional organization, or possibly moving into something like academia where you just figure things out without a direct profit goal.
In Habryka’s frame, as I understand it (yo habryka feel free to write a version of this that articulates it better. :P), the University is Mission-Aligned. The official curriculum is of the form “study the particular disciplines you need to make serious progress on the Mission”. There are various clubs that range from Mission-adjaecent (like Model UN) or random theater / craft / cultural clubs.
The Church and the Bulletin Board
Another subtly alternate frame from Village is Church.
“Village” vaguely implies that the primary connection is geographic and economic. To some extent, people trust each other because if people aren’t literally plowing fields and blacksmithing and what-not, the village starves in the winter.
“Church” is something that can continues to succeed even in a large town or city where people come and go more easily (although I’m not confident this is a stable arrangement – once you have large cities, atomic individualism and the gradual erosion of Church might be inevitable)
To be a member of a church, you are expected to tithe, and to show up at mass every Sunday. You listen to sermons that establish common knowledge of what your people do-and-don’t-do. You recite words that most likely have some affect on your psychology even if you don’t literally believe them.
The church is designed to scale – large numbers of people in pews facing a single priest. (There are alternate arrangements like pagan circles that don’t scale as well that require higher skill on the part of participants). A crowd of people, many of whom haven’t met, can participate, without newbies messing anything up.
During church, people who are going through hard times, or who have passed particular milestones, are mentioned and prayed for.
Once you get inside the church, there is a bulletin board, that includes a bunch of activities like soup kitchen volunteer, bible study, choir practice, and maybe less relevant things like bingo night. Many of these provide sub-communities that are easy to get involved but require real work and commitment to excel at.
If you are sick, or recently had a funeral, someone literally brings you soup.
There is a natural “minimum membership” (wherein you get soup if you’re sick, but aren’t necessarily high status), and the cost for that is 10% of your income and a whole lot of time. I’m guessing (but am not confident, I’ve never been to church for an extended period) that there is additional belonging/social-support/power that you get if you prove yourself a useful and/or fun member of the community.
I would like to have a community that strives to be rational also “outside the lab”. The words “professional bayesianism” feel like bayesianism within the lab. (I haven’t read the book, so perhaps I am misinterpreting the author’s intent.)
That’s nice, but ultimately, if there is a tension between “what is better for you” and “what is better for Google”, Google will probably choose the latter. What could possibly be good for you but bad for Google? Thinking for less than one minute I’d say: becoming financially independent, so you no longer have to work; building your own startup; finding a spouse, having kids, and refusing to work overtime...
Yeah, this is a fully general argument against any society, but it seems to me that a Village, simply by not being profit oriented, would have greater freedom to optimize for the benefit of its members. For a business company, every employer is a cost. In a village, well-behaving citizens pay their own bills, and provide some value to each other, whether that value is greater or smaller, it is still positive or zero.
An important part of being in the Church is being physically present at its religious activities, e.g. every Sunday morning. So even if you happen to be surrounded mostly by non-believers in your city, at least once in a week you become physically surrounded by believers. (A temporary Village.) Physical proximity creates the kind of emotions that internet cannot substitute.
Church is an “eukaryotic” organization: it has a boundary on the outside (believers vs non-believers), but also inside (clergy vs lay members). This slows down value shift: you can accept many believers, while only worrying about value alignment of the clergy: potential heretical opinions of the lay members are just their personal opinions, not the official teaching; if necessary, the clergy will make this clear in a coordinated way. Having stronger filter in the inner boundary allows you to have weaker filter on the outer boundary, because there is no democracy in the outer circle.
Translated to the language of the article: Mission can have multiple Villages, but Village can only have one Mission. As an example, if meditation becomes popular among some rationalists, and they start going to Buddhist retreats and hanging out with Buddhist, and then they bring their nerdy Buddhist friends to rationality meetups… it should be clear that the rationalist community is in absolutely no risk of becoming a religious community, because the mysterious bullshit of Buddhism will be rejected (at least by the inner circle) just like the mysterious bullshit of any other religion. Similarly when people will try to conquer the rationalist community for their political faction; but I believe we are doing quite well here.
The important thing here is that the sermons come from the top. They do not represent the latest fashionable contrarian opinion. The Church provides many things for its members, but freedom to give sermons is not one of them.
(To avoid misunderstanding: I am not praising dictatorship for the dictatorship’s sake here. Rather, it is my experience from various projects, that there is a type of people who come to introduce controversy, but don’t contribute to the core mission. These people will cause drama, and provide nothing useful in return. If they win, they will only keep pushing further; if they lose, they will ragequit and maybe spend some time slandering you. It is nice to have a mechanism that stops them at the door. Even more importantly in a group that attracts so many contrarians, and where “hey, you call yourselves ‘rationalists’, but you irrationally refuse my opinion before you spent thousand hours debating it thoroughly?!” is a powerful argument. The sermons are a tool of coordination, and coordination is hard.)