[ comment copied from Facebook / I didn’t read the full article before making this comment ]
i am somewhat anti-”Mission-centered Village.”
i think entanglement between mission and livelihood already causes problems. (you start feeling that the mission is good b/c it feeds you, and that an attack on the mission is an attack on your ability to feed yourself / earn income)
entanglement between mission and family/home seems like it causes more of those problems. (you start feeling that if your home is threatened in any way, this is a threat to the mission, and if you feel that your mission is threatened, it is a threat to your home.)
avoiding mental / emotional entanglement in this way i think would require a very high bar: a mind well-trained in the art of { introspection / meditation / small-identity / surrender / relinquishment } or something in that area. i suspect <10 ppl in the community to meet that bar?
I think that there are a few plausible theories of the rationalist community and how they relate to the mission:
[0] Null hypothesis: no connection. This is obviously implausible if you’ve spent 3 seconds around the community or its mission.
1. The community and the mission are the same. Even the less immediately relevant activities create an intellectual and social milieu which is conducive to progress. The ability to engage with other intellectuals at low cost to oneself means that insights are shared between key individuals at faster rate. The community provides high value to the mission by enabling it. The mission provides high value to the community.
2. The community exists at least in part to play interference for the missionaries. Being able to do real thinking means a certain degree of insulation from the real world; having fewer demands on your time, having your basic human needs taken care of, having the ability to en. The community provides medium value to the mission by shielding it. The mission provides low value to the community, because the community’s strength derives from elsewhere. I think this is what you are advocating, and it’s one that I like.
3. The community [in aggregate] puts the minimum effort towards the mission to look convincing because if it were to openly admit that it doesn’t actually care about the mission people would leave. People are all here because pretending to have a shared goal is as good as actually having one in terms of bringing people together. The community provides slightly positive value to the mission, but selfishly. The mission provides high value to the community.
4. The community exists as a social pasttime with no clear purpose. It exists as a space not for real concern about x-risk, but primarily as a social outgrowth of the tech sector, a safe space for weirdness. The community detracts from the mission by exerting, even unintentionally, a social pressure upon missionaries to regress to the mean. The mission provides no value to the community.
The epistemic concerns here (i.e. warping your perception of the mission / home / resistance to giving up either) are definitely the strongest argument I can see for making sure there is a non-mission-centered village.
I’m not sure I’m persuaded, though, because of the aforementioned “something needs to orient and drive the community.” You could certainly pick something other than “The Mission.” But whatever you pick, you’re going to end up with something that you become overly attached to.
My actual best guess is that the village should be oriented around truthseeking and the mission oriented around [truthseeking and] impact.
I think if you are in the village and have bad epistemics, you should get at least subtle pressure to improve your epistemics (possibly less subtle pressure over time, especially if you are taking up memetic space). You should not receive pressure for being on board with the mission, but you should receive at least a little pressure to have thought a bit about the mission and have some kind of opinion about it that actually engages with it.
Another component here is to have more (healthy) competition among orgs. I’m still sorting out what this means when it comes to organizations that sort-of-want-to-be-natural-monopolies. But I think if there’s only one org doing [rationality training / village infrastructure / communication infrastructure] then you’re sort of forced to conflate “is this thing good?” with “is this org doing a good job” along with “am I good for supporting them?”, which leads to weird bucket-errors.
My actual best guess is that the village should be oriented around truthseeking and the mission oriented around [truthseeking and] impact.
John Tooby has suggested that whatever becomes the orienting thing of a community, becomes automatically the subject of mind-killing impulses:
Coalition-mindedness makes everyone, including scientists, far stupider in coalitional collectivities than as individuals. Paradoxically, a political party united by supernatural beliefs can revise its beliefs about economics or climate without revisers being bad coalition members. But people whose coalitional membership is constituted by their shared adherence to “rational,” scientific propositions have a problem when—as is generally the case—new information arises which requires belief revision. To question or disagree with coalitional precepts, even for rational reasons, makes one a bad and immoral coalition member—at risk of losing job offers, one’s friends, and one’s cherished group identity. This freezes belief revision.
Forming coalitions around scientific or factual questions is disastrous, because it pits our urge for scientific truth-seeking against the nearly insuperable human appetite to be a good coalition member. Once scientific propositions are moralized, the scientific process is wounded, often fatally. No one is behaving either ethically or scientifically who does not make the best case possible for rival theories with which one disagrees.
I wouldn’t go so far as to say that this makes truthseeking a bad idea to orient around, since there does seem to be a way to orient around it in a way which avoids this failure mode, but at least one should be very cautious about how exactly.
If I think of the communities which I’ve seen that seem to have successfully oriented around truthseeking to some extent, the difference seems to be something like a process vs. content distinction. People aren’t going around explicitly swearing allegiance to rationality, but they are constantly signaling a truthseeking orientation through their behavior, such as by actively looking for other people’s cruxes in conversation and indicating their own.
people whose coalitional membership is constituted by their shared adherence to “rational,” scientific propositions have a problem when—as is generally the case—new information arises which requires belief revision.
My first reaction was that perhaps the community should be centered around updating on evidence rather than any specific science.
But of course, that can fail, too. For example, people can signal their virtue by updating on tinier and tinier pieces of evidence. Like, when the probability increases from 0.000001 to 0.0000011, people start yelling about how this changes everything, and if you say “huh, for me that is almost no change at all”, you become the unworthy one who refuses to update in face of evidence.
(The people updating on the tiny evidence most likely won’t even be technically correct, because purposefully looking for microscopic pieces of evidence will naturally introduce selection bias and double counting.)
People aren’t going around explicitly swearing allegiance to rationality, but they are constantly signaling a truthseeking orientation through their behavior, such as by actively looking for other people’s cruxes in conversation and indicating their own.
I’m realizing that I need to make the following distinction here:
Village 1) There is a core of folks in the village that are doing a hard thing (Mission). and also their friends, family, and neighbors who support them and each other but are not directly involved in the Mission.
Village 2) There is a village with only ppl who are doing the direct Mission work. Other friends, family, etc. do not make their homes in the village.
I weakly think it’s possible for 1 to be good.
I think 2 runs into lots of problems and is what my original comment was speaking against.
(I think it may be correct to have multiple overlapping-and-or-concentric circles, where there’s a village that’s “Mission + friends/family/neighbors”, which realistically also just grows organically over time)
And then there’s something that maybe is better to call a “Mission community” than “Mission village” which isn’t trying to be a village per se, but is just making sure that people involved in the Mission get the opportunity to connect more over Mission stuff specifically. (Which is probably less public facing, but which maybe occasionally has more open invite events so that people who are interested in transitioning into the Mission have opportunity to do so).
If Mission requires a lot of work (or isn’t paid well, so you need an extra job to pay your bills), people will have to reduce their involvement when they have kids. And most people are going to have kids at some moment of their lives.
On the other hand, Village without kids… should more properly be called Hotel or Campus.
Thus, Village helps Mission by keeping currently inactive people close, so even if you cannot use their work at the moment, you can still use some of their expertise. Also, the involvement doesn’t have to be “all or nothing”; people with school-age kids can be part-time involved.
Mission without Village will keep losing tacit knowledge, and will probably have to make stronger pressure on keeping and recruiting members. (Which can become a positive feedback loop, if members start leaving because of increased pressure, and the pressure increases as a reaction to the threat of losing members.)
“Real Mission Work” generally takes the form of an actual full-time job (many new projects start off as a weird scrappy hybrid of “random project / startup”, but IMO basically the goal is to transition into serious fulltime work once you’ve demonstrated that you are capable enough to get funding)
Mission work varies in how much it’s like a startup, and how much it’s like an ordinary non-startup-job. Startup-like mission-orgs are probably hard to work at if you have kids. (I think I recall Paul Graham or someone claiming that you can pick two: Startup, Hobbies, Kids. So you might have kids but not otherwise have a life, and shouldn’t have both parents be startup-ing)
I think I still generally agree with the points you make about keeping inactive people in the circle, and that a village without kids makes more sense to see through the Campus lens.
I think there is a distinction between village and home, and that they can have somewhat different focused. That a home can be home centered while a village can be mission-centered. I’m not sure this is the ideal arrangement, but I put some weight on it being so.
The alternative is to live in a village that is not mission centered. I’m worried that will preclude many kinds of successful missions.
[ comment copied from Facebook / I didn’t read the full article before making this comment ]
i am somewhat anti-”Mission-centered Village.”
i think entanglement between mission and livelihood already causes problems. (you start feeling that the mission is good b/c it feeds you, and that an attack on the mission is an attack on your ability to feed yourself / earn income)
entanglement between mission and family/home seems like it causes more of those problems. (you start feeling that if your home is threatened in any way, this is a threat to the mission, and if you feel that your mission is threatened, it is a threat to your home.)
avoiding mental / emotional entanglement in this way i think would require a very high bar: a mind well-trained in the art of { introspection / meditation / small-identity / surrender / relinquishment } or something in that area. i suspect <10 ppl in the community to meet that bar?
I think that there are a few plausible theories of the rationalist community and how they relate to the mission:
[0] Null hypothesis: no connection. This is obviously implausible if you’ve spent 3 seconds around the community or its mission.
1. The community and the mission are the same. Even the less immediately relevant activities create an intellectual and social milieu which is conducive to progress. The ability to engage with other intellectuals at low cost to oneself means that insights are shared between key individuals at faster rate. The community provides high value to the mission by enabling it. The mission provides high value to the community.
2. The community exists at least in part to play interference for the missionaries. Being able to do real thinking means a certain degree of insulation from the real world; having fewer demands on your time, having your basic human needs taken care of, having the ability to en. The community provides medium value to the mission by shielding it. The mission provides low value to the community, because the community’s strength derives from elsewhere. I think this is what you are advocating, and it’s one that I like.
3. The community [in aggregate] puts the minimum effort towards the mission to look convincing because if it were to openly admit that it doesn’t actually care about the mission people would leave. People are all here because pretending to have a shared goal is as good as actually having one in terms of bringing people together. The community provides slightly positive value to the mission, but selfishly. The mission provides high value to the community.
4. The community exists as a social pasttime with no clear purpose. It exists as a space not for real concern about x-risk, but primarily as a social outgrowth of the tech sector, a safe space for weirdness. The community detracts from the mission by exerting, even unintentionally, a social pressure upon missionaries to regress to the mean. The mission provides no value to the community.
The epistemic concerns here (i.e. warping your perception of the mission / home / resistance to giving up either) are definitely the strongest argument I can see for making sure there is a non-mission-centered village.
I’m not sure I’m persuaded, though, because of the aforementioned “something needs to orient and drive the community.” You could certainly pick something other than “The Mission.” But whatever you pick, you’re going to end up with something that you become overly attached to.
My actual best guess is that the village should be oriented around truthseeking and the mission oriented around [truthseeking and] impact.
I think if you are in the village and have bad epistemics, you should get at least subtle pressure to improve your epistemics (possibly less subtle pressure over time, especially if you are taking up memetic space). You should not receive pressure for being on board with the mission, but you should receive at least a little pressure to have thought a bit about the mission and have some kind of opinion about it that actually engages with it.
Another component here is to have more (healthy) competition among orgs. I’m still sorting out what this means when it comes to organizations that sort-of-want-to-be-natural-monopolies. But I think if there’s only one org doing [rationality training / village infrastructure / communication infrastructure] then you’re sort of forced to conflate “is this thing good?” with “is this org doing a good job” along with “am I good for supporting them?”, which leads to weird bucket-errors.
John Tooby has suggested that whatever becomes the orienting thing of a community, becomes automatically the subject of mind-killing impulses:
I wouldn’t go so far as to say that this makes truthseeking a bad idea to orient around, since there does seem to be a way to orient around it in a way which avoids this failure mode, but at least one should be very cautious about how exactly.
If I think of the communities which I’ve seen that seem to have successfully oriented around truthseeking to some extent, the difference seems to be something like a process vs. content distinction. People aren’t going around explicitly swearing allegiance to rationality, but they are constantly signaling a truthseeking orientation through their behavior, such as by actively looking for other people’s cruxes in conversation and indicating their own.
My first reaction was that perhaps the community should be centered around updating on evidence rather than any specific science.
But of course, that can fail, too. For example, people can signal their virtue by updating on tinier and tinier pieces of evidence. Like, when the probability increases from 0.000001 to 0.0000011, people start yelling about how this changes everything, and if you say “huh, for me that is almost no change at all”, you become the unworthy one who refuses to update in face of evidence.
(The people updating on the tiny evidence most likely won’t even be technically correct, because purposefully looking for microscopic pieces of evidence will naturally introduce selection bias and double counting.)
Yeah, this is roughly what I meant.
I’m realizing that I need to make the following distinction here:
Village 1) There is a core of folks in the village that are doing a hard thing (Mission). and also their friends, family, and neighbors who support them and each other but are not directly involved in the Mission.
Village 2) There is a village with only ppl who are doing the direct Mission work. Other friends, family, etc. do not make their homes in the village.
I weakly think it’s possible for 1 to be good.
I think 2 runs into lots of problems and is what my original comment was speaking against.
I agree that the village basically needs to be #1 (and could see a case for something broader than that)
(I think it may be correct to have multiple overlapping-and-or-concentric circles, where there’s a village that’s “Mission + friends/family/neighbors”, which realistically also just grows organically over time)
And then there’s something that maybe is better to call a “Mission community” than “Mission village” which isn’t trying to be a village per se, but is just making sure that people involved in the Mission get the opportunity to connect more over Mission stuff specifically. (Which is probably less public facing, but which maybe occasionally has more open invite events so that people who are interested in transitioning into the Mission have opportunity to do so).
If Mission requires a lot of work (or isn’t paid well, so you need an extra job to pay your bills), people will have to reduce their involvement when they have kids. And most people are going to have kids at some moment of their lives.
On the other hand, Village without kids… should more properly be called Hotel or Campus.
Thus, Village helps Mission by keeping currently inactive people close, so even if you cannot use their work at the moment, you can still use some of their expertise. Also, the involvement doesn’t have to be “all or nothing”; people with school-age kids can be part-time involved.
Mission without Village will keep losing tacit knowledge, and will probably have to make stronger pressure on keeping and recruiting members. (Which can become a positive feedback loop, if members start leaving because of increased pressure, and the pressure increases as a reaction to the threat of losing members.)
“Real Mission Work” generally takes the form of an actual full-time job (many new projects start off as a weird scrappy hybrid of “random project / startup”, but IMO basically the goal is to transition into serious fulltime work once you’ve demonstrated that you are capable enough to get funding)
Mission work varies in how much it’s like a startup, and how much it’s like an ordinary non-startup-job. Startup-like mission-orgs are probably hard to work at if you have kids. (I think I recall Paul Graham or someone claiming that you can pick two: Startup, Hobbies, Kids. So you might have kids but not otherwise have a life, and shouldn’t have both parents be startup-ing)
I think I still generally agree with the points you make about keeping inactive people in the circle, and that a village without kids makes more sense to see through the Campus lens.
[Comment copied from fb]:
I think there is a distinction between village and home, and that they can have somewhat different focused. That a home can be home centered while a village can be mission-centered. I’m not sure this is the ideal arrangement, but I put some weight on it being so.
The alternative is to live in a village that is not mission centered. I’m worried that will preclude many kinds of successful missions.