“Some newcomers often find the culture impenetrable and unwelcoming” seems like a feature (not a bug). If anything ought be changed about it, I think the unwelcoming attitude ought be more discerning—excluding people based on properties most of the community actually doesn’t want around, rather than or in tandem with whatever criteria it’s currently operating on.
Rubix
Karma: 923
I grew up in a hippie commune and I recommend this!
Endorsed.
I voiced my reservations about this project in the feedback form, but in summary for public record:
I approve of:
a thriving in-person rationalist or rationalist-adjacent community (“community” for short) existing somewhere that’s not a metropolis
a community that does not oblige its members to “live rationally” according to some consensus definition thereof
a community encouraging people to experiment with their lives and gain real-world rationality skills
I have reservations about:
the claim that the rationalist community as it exists is predominantly upper-middle-class.
In particular, it seems very likely to me that Bendini’s sense of alienation from the UK Cambridge Solstice is best explained by the demographics of Cambridge, rather than the demographics of rationalists. I know many high-profile rationalists who do not come from upper-middle-class backgrounds and who spend their money carefully. Most of the rationalists I know in-person are college dropouts, not Oxbridge elites. There’s plenty more I could say on this issue.
the tone of the project
the difficulty of immigrating to the UK
the degree of similarity to Alicorn’s bagruppe idea—there’s one line about kids, but this doesn’t seem like a thoroughly kid-oriented project.
Source on those statistics, please? I find the claims dubious: in particular, the 25% figure seems to come from this “information packet”, which is unsourced and uncited, suggesting that it may not exist. The two Jensens, Cory Jewell and Steve, seem to build a career around inflating the numbers associated with child sexual assault. I can’t find sources for either of the other figures.
My stake in the game: I strongly distrust statistics given about child sexual assault unless they are highly specific about what is being discussed, for two reasons.
One is that the definition is incredibly vague: some sources mean “an adult engaging in intercourse with a minor under 13”, others mean “touch intended to be sexually gratifying, of a minor under 18, by another party of any age”, and definitions run the gamut. Another example: under this website’s definition of child sexual abuse, “any sexual activity between adults and minors or between two minors when one forces it on the other (...) like exhibitionism, exposure to pornography”, I was sexually abused at 11 when a chatroom troll sent me a link that turned out to be Two Girls, One Cup.
My second reason for reservation around these statistics is that they rarely take into consideration the preferences of the minor. When I was a minor, I had healthy and fulfilling sexual relationships; under many existing definitions, I was sexually assaulted by my loving sixteen-year-old boyfriend when I was sixteen, and under many more I was sexually assaulted by him when he turned eighteen and I was still seventeen. This seems ridiculous and objectionable to me.
A last note: I agree that it is impossible to tell from a few hours of interaction whether someone will abuse your child. Many people can’t tell even after years of loving marriage whether their spouse will abuse their children, so “demonstrating acceptable qualities” is not a very good intervention. The absolute best defense against one’s children having unwanted/traumatic interactions is to tell them how to set boundaries, tell them to yell if they’re touched in a way they don’t want, tell them that their body is their own and that nobody gets to touch it without their permission. This has the virtue of defending against all manner of abuse and mistreatment, at the hands of parents, extended family, family friends and acquaintances alike.
Interested!
For the author and the audience: what are your favourite patience- and sanity-inducing rituals?
I’m up for doing this, because I think you’re right; I notice that commenting/posting on LessWrong has less draw for me than it did in 2011/2012, but it’s also much less intimidating, which seems useful.
The contrast on the side-by-side options is way too low (clicking a dark blue text bubble turns it a slightly darker blue).
Surveiled!
Personally: Overall positive experiences. I’m polyamorous by nature, and have never had a relationship that wasn’t poly. In my friend circle (bay area rationalists) there’s a fair bit of polyamory. It seems like there’s more + happier relationships, as well as more + calmer breakups, when I compare to the current relationships of my acquaintances from high school.
Negative data point: someone I know tried polyamory for (I think) 10-25 years, had a lot of difficult life experiences some of which related to her relationships, and has lately skewed towards relationship anarchy but with one primary romantic partner.
Data point in favor of poly, but sad: I know a person who left a 10-year relationship last year due to (her own) cheating and has been cheerfully doing CNM since then.
Survey surveilled!
s/by seeing someone else stupidity/by seeing someone else’s stupidity/
I took the survey.
The top item in my to-do list reads: “If confused, make list! If confusion persists, make lists for lists!”
Point being, I think taskifying in order to avoid counting difficult, unpleasant tasks as one item is useful because it better mirrors reality. For (very ground-level) instance, eating enough meals in a day is hard for me to do consistently because “eat a meal” has a ton of steps: decide what to eat, find ingredients, assemble, and so on. So if I lie to myself and say it’s only one step, I feel bad about being so stupid for having trouble with Just One Step, and subsequently don’t do anything because I’m in an Ugh Field. If I acknowledge that if I am having trouble accomplishing something, that means it has multiple steps… well, I still do less than my fictional idealized self would do, but I still do more than otherwise.
I find that a lot of my friends have trouble grokking this because the rationalist/perfectionist ideacluster is heavily grouped. For some reason it’s hard to think about what a perfect rational agent would do without, at least somewhat and unconsciously, comparing oneself to that agent.
“In any man who dies, there dies with him his first snow and kiss and fight. Not people die, but worlds die in them.”
-Yevgeny Yevtushenko
I assume the capitals are about signaling “goodness”
I use Meaningful Initial Caps to communicate tone, but recognize that it’s nonstandard. Sorry for any confusion.
So as far as I can tell, you’re saying that “awesomeness” is a good basis for noticing what one’s brain currently considers moral, so it can then rebuild its definitions from there.
To extend the metaphor, “sexiness is (perceived by the intuitive parts of your brain, absent intervention from moralizing or abstract-cognition parts, as) consent” is a good thing to pay attention to, so you can know what that part of you actually cares about, which gives you new information that isn’t simply from choosing a side on the “Sexiness is about evopsych and golden ratios and trading meat for sex!” versus “Sexiness is about communication and queer theory praxis and bucking stereotypes!” battle.
What I’m curious about is:
rebuilding it from intuition without interference from Deep Wisdom or philosophical cached thoughts.
What, then, do you rebuild your current conception of morality from? “Blowing up people, when I have vague evidence that they’re mooks of the Forces of Evil, by the dozens, is a bad idea, even though it seems awesome” seems like a philosophical cached thought to me. Do you think it’s something else?
Counterfactual terrorism—“but those mooks may not be mooks!”—isn’t a good tool for discerning actual bad ideas.
If I respond to “Consent is sexy!” by saying “But some of my brain doesn’t think that!”, noticing what those brainbits actually think, then change those brainbits to find sexy what I think of as “consent”, I’m not in a very different situation from the person who’s cheering blindly for consent being sexy. I just believe my premise more on the ground level, which will blind me to ways in which my preconceived notions of consent might suck.
In other words, both my intuitive models of awesomeness and my explicit models of morality might be lame in many invisible ways. What then?
“Morality is awesome”, as a statement, scans like “consent is sexy” to me. Neither of these statements are true enough to be useful except as signalling or a personal goal (“I would like to find X thing I believe to be moral more awesome, so as to hack my brain to be more moral”).
In some cases of assessing morality/awesomeness or consent/sexiness correlation, one would sometimes have to lie about their awesomeness/sexiness preferences, and ignore those preferences in order to be a Perfectly Moral Good Individual who does not Like Evil Things.
Quirrell scans, to me, as more awesome along the “probably knows far more Secret Eldrich Lore than you” and “stereotype of a winner” axes, until I remember that Hermione is, canonically, also both of those things. (Eldrich Lore is something one can know, so she knows it. And she’s more academically successful than anyone I’ve ever known in real life.)
So when I look more closely, the thing my brain is valuing is a script it follows where Hermione is both obviously unskillful about standard human things (feminism, kissing boys, Science Monogamy) and obviously cares about morality, to a degree that my brain thinks counts as weakness. When I pay attention, Quirrell is unskillful about tons of things as well, but he doesn’t visibly acknowledge that he is/has been unskillful. He also may or may not care about ethics to a degree, but his Questionably Moral Snazzy Bad Guy archetype doesn’t let him show this.
It does come around to Quirrell being more my stereotype of a winner, in a sense. Quirrell is more high-status than Hermione—when he does things that are cruel, wrong or stupid he hides it or recontextualizes it into something snazzy—but Hermione is more honorable than Quirrell. She confronts her mistakes and failings publicly, messily and head-on and grows as a person because of that. I think that’s really awesome.
I’m curious about this as well.
“Witches don’t often get angry. All that shouting business never really gets anybody anywhere.”
After another pause, Letitia said, “If that is true, then maybe I’m not cut out to be a witch. I feel very angry sometimes.”
“Oh, I feel very angry a lot of the time,” said Tiffany, “but I just put it away somewhere until I can do something useful with it. That’s the thing about witchcraft—and wizardry, come to that. We don’t do much magic at the best of times, and when we do, we generally do it on ourselves.”
-Terry Pratchett, I Shall Wear Midnight