I figured I should be clearer about what I actual plan to be doing with all this:
1. I, personally, am trying to figure out a plan for improving the “Mission community”, with moderately high fences. I think this is the right use of my current position and skillset. I do not yet have a plan.
1b. A subset of the above is seeing who is interested in contributing to a Mission community, and what particular things they are motivated to do. Who and what is available would determine what sort of plans are possible.
2. I want to help people who are interested in helping significantly with the village self-organize better. This involves a couple things:
2a. Getting a sense of who is already working on what.
2b. Getting a sense of who is available to put more energy into what.
2c. Getting a sense of what needs doing.
2d. Clarifying some of my own thinking on what failure modes to watch out for, and what experiments make sense to try next.
2e. The process of chatting with a bunch of people who are interested in contributing can then provide an opportunity to get people more aligned, such that people are working on projects that fit together synergistically.
2f. Providing mentorship/guidance in the domains where I feel like I have useful guidance to offer. (My own self-imposed rule is no longer be directly responsible for things in the village, but to contribute effort when I reasonably expect that effort to increase overall village longterm leadership capacity)
I still feel like the ideal solution is Archipelago – rather than trying to have one village and one mission, there should be multiple overlapping clusters aspiring towards different things. I think this is healthier both from a “variety” standpoint as well as avoiding certain kinds of political conflict. The problem with Archipelago is that it’s very leadership constrained – you need people who can both uphold standards and help people to learn them, but also to provide value that makes those standards worth living up to, attracting people.
Some village-projects that I think make sense include:
Strengthening individual group houses (probably have an upcoming blogpost on this)
Running mid-size events that are relatively low effort (right now there are a couple major community events each year – Summer/Winter Solstice, and EA Global and CFAR Reunion. I think there could be at least 2 lower key spring/autumn events that are large but less effortful)
Scaling knowledge of how to interface with bureaucracy
Getting a sense of who is already working on what. …
I would love to read an overview of things that are being done, in the rationalist community. By reading Less Wrong regularly, I am exposed to many random things, but I may have large blind spots. I would like to see the curated big picture.
In addition to big picture (list of meetups or podcasts or research groups), it would be also nice to have a database of helpful people (who organize the meetups, or bring cookies), but the later should probably not be public. I have heard stories of people who come to rationalist community with the goal of extracting free work (under vague and non-committal promises of improving the world or contributing to charity) from naive people. So, if someone loves to bake cookies and bring them to meetups, it would be nice to give their contact to local meetup organizers, but not to make it completely public so that random parasites will spam them. Maybe a trivial inconvenience of “show me the specific work you have already done, before I give you the list of contacts” would be enough.
I figured I should be clearer about what I actual plan to be doing with all this:
1. I, personally, am trying to figure out a plan for improving the “Mission community”, with moderately high fences. I think this is the right use of my current position and skillset. I do not yet have a plan.
1b. A subset of the above is seeing who is interested in contributing to a Mission community, and what particular things they are motivated to do. Who and what is available would determine what sort of plans are possible.
2. I want to help people who are interested in helping significantly with the village self-organize better. This involves a couple things:
2a. Getting a sense of who is already working on what.
2b. Getting a sense of who is available to put more energy into what.
2c. Getting a sense of what needs doing.
2d. Clarifying some of my own thinking on what failure modes to watch out for, and what experiments make sense to try next.
2e. The process of chatting with a bunch of people who are interested in contributing can then provide an opportunity to get people more aligned, such that people are working on projects that fit together synergistically.
2f. Providing mentorship/guidance in the domains where I feel like I have useful guidance to offer. (My own self-imposed rule is no longer be directly responsible for things in the village, but to contribute effort when I reasonably expect that effort to increase overall village longterm leadership capacity)
I still feel like the ideal solution is Archipelago – rather than trying to have one village and one mission, there should be multiple overlapping clusters aspiring towards different things. I think this is healthier both from a “variety” standpoint as well as avoiding certain kinds of political conflict. The problem with Archipelago is that it’s very leadership constrained – you need people who can both uphold standards and help people to learn them, but also to provide value that makes those standards worth living up to, attracting people.
Some village-projects that I think make sense include:
Strengthening individual group houses (probably have an upcoming blogpost on this)
Running mid-size events that are relatively low effort (right now there are a couple major community events each year – Summer/Winter Solstice, and EA Global and CFAR Reunion. I think there could be at least 2 lower key spring/autumn events that are large but less effortful)
Scaling knowledge of how to interface with bureaucracy
I would love to read an overview of things that are being done, in the rationalist community. By reading Less Wrong regularly, I am exposed to many random things, but I may have large blind spots. I would like to see the curated big picture.
In addition to big picture (list of meetups or podcasts or research groups), it would be also nice to have a database of helpful people (who organize the meetups, or bring cookies), but the later should probably not be public. I have heard stories of people who come to rationalist community with the goal of extracting free work (under vague and non-committal promises of improving the world or contributing to charity) from naive people. So, if someone loves to bake cookies and bring them to meetups, it would be nice to give their contact to local meetup organizers, but not to make it completely public so that random parasites will spam them. Maybe a trivial inconvenience of “show me the specific work you have already done, before I give you the list of contacts” would be enough.