This is an interesting take on it, and it resonated more strongly that I was expecting. It matches my personal experience (i.e it was not hard to notice little opportunities to incrementally increase my commitment to the mission, and if I was less interested, I might have drifted away instead).
But my impression is this is not true for everyone. One clearcut thing is that there’s a certain threshold of agency and self-efficacy that someone needs to have demonstrated before I feel comfortable inviting them to mission-centric spaces (over the longterm), and I think I’m not alone in that. I think there are people who have “mixed competencies”, where they’ve gotten good at some things but not others, and they want to be able to help the mission, and there are subtle and not-so-subtle social forces that push them away.
And I’m not sure there’s anything wrong with that, but it seems important to acknowledge.
A major prompt for this post was reading Sarah’s the Craft is Not The Community post, where my impression is that she hadn’t run into rationality-community projects that actually seemed outward facing and valuable (and perhaps had run into a few projects that seemed to think themselves as being outward facing, but didn’t actually seem that valuable).
It was weird to me that Sarah’s social graph resulted in that experience.
This whole post was basically a reaction to that, where it seemed to me a) that I do in fact run into orgs trying to make real world results happen, b) my experience with the village has always been “helps you get ready for the Mission but isn’t the Mission.”
But my impression is this is not true for everyone. One clearcut thing is that there’s a certain threshold of agency and self-efficacy that someone needs to have demonstrated before I feel comfortable inviting them to mission-centric spaces (over the longterm), and I think I’m not alone in that. I think there are people who have “mixed competencies”, where they’ve gotten good at some things but others, and they want to be able to help the mission, and there are subtle and not-so-subtle social forces that push them away.
And I’m not sure there’s anything wrong with that, but it seems important to acknowledge.
I think there’s something proper in the function of a sangha (and by extension, our community) that it discourages those who don’t have, as you put it, the “agency and self-efficacy” to properly engage in the mission, and also pushes out those who are only half in it, such that what I can imagine as “mixed competencies” results in them not staying despite the fact that they could have stayed if they had been more committed and willing to make space for themselves in a place that was willing to tolerate them but not usher them in.
Of course, it feels a bit weird because in sangha that’s directly tied to the purpose of the community and can be done skillfully as part of transmitting the dharma, whereas in our community this seems at cross-purposes with the mission and can feel to some like defecting on paying the cost to train and develop the people it needs. Probably this is part of what sets apart sangha from other forms of community: it’s shape is directly tied to its function, and is a natural extension of the mission, where elsewhere other shapes could be adopted because the mission does not directly suggest one.
This is an interesting take on it, and it resonated more strongly that I was expecting. It matches my personal experience (i.e it was not hard to notice little opportunities to incrementally increase my commitment to the mission, and if I was less interested, I might have drifted away instead).
But my impression is this is not true for everyone. One clearcut thing is that there’s a certain threshold of agency and self-efficacy that someone needs to have demonstrated before I feel comfortable inviting them to mission-centric spaces (over the longterm), and I think I’m not alone in that. I think there are people who have “mixed competencies”, where they’ve gotten good at some things but not others, and they want to be able to help the mission, and there are subtle and not-so-subtle social forces that push them away.
And I’m not sure there’s anything wrong with that, but it seems important to acknowledge.
A major prompt for this post was reading Sarah’s the Craft is Not The Community post, where my impression is that she hadn’t run into rationality-community projects that actually seemed outward facing and valuable (and perhaps had run into a few projects that seemed to think themselves as being outward facing, but didn’t actually seem that valuable).
It was weird to me that Sarah’s social graph resulted in that experience.
This whole post was basically a reaction to that, where it seemed to me a) that I do in fact run into orgs trying to make real world results happen, b) my experience with the village has always been “helps you get ready for the Mission but isn’t the Mission.”
I think there’s something proper in the function of a sangha (and by extension, our community) that it discourages those who don’t have, as you put it, the “agency and self-efficacy” to properly engage in the mission, and also pushes out those who are only half in it, such that what I can imagine as “mixed competencies” results in them not staying despite the fact that they could have stayed if they had been more committed and willing to make space for themselves in a place that was willing to tolerate them but not usher them in.
Of course, it feels a bit weird because in sangha that’s directly tied to the purpose of the community and can be done skillfully as part of transmitting the dharma, whereas in our community this seems at cross-purposes with the mission and can feel to some like defecting on paying the cost to train and develop the people it needs. Probably this is part of what sets apart sangha from other forms of community: it’s shape is directly tied to its function, and is a natural extension of the mission, where elsewhere other shapes could be adopted because the mission does not directly suggest one.