I think it was good as a rationalist house, and something like 10-30% better than the rationalist house you would have had if the same group of people had just formed a house together without a clear structure. I also think it was basically a failure at the stated goals / house charter.
I’m also glad that we tried it, and would not advise past-me to not try it, and mostly agree with Duncan’s advice to past-Duncan. (I also expect to stick around for the next stage of the house, which will likely be a regular rationalist house with some more structure.)
Some parts I disagree with:
I am more convinced than ever that little things like hand gestures, formal call-and-response patterns, jargon, little rituals, and explicitly outlined ways-of-interacting are a huge make-or-break for something like DA, and that I hit them lightly enough that we ended up in “break” territory.
I don’t think that this was a major input into the outcome of the house, and am somewhat confused that you’re more convinced of this now. It feels like there were ~3 obviously important things that didn’t happen, ~6 things of uncertain importance that didn’t happen, and the project didn’t succeed; this state of affairs is basically equally likely in the world where those little things are make-or-break and the world where those little things are irrelevant. Where’s the Bayesian evidence coming from?
Shifting gears a little—I’d tell past Duncan to start some kind of permanent record-keeping. We kept a LOT of data out on the walls, in public spaces, but it was always This Experiment or That Experiment—scattershot and inconsistent.
I don’t think the versions of this that we actually tried worked very well. My model here is that the core feature is having a good metric that people are bought into, and am pessimistic about versions of this without that feature. (The past versions that we tried were proposals of metrics, which people mostly didn’t buy into, and so after trying it out for three weeks or so it was abandoned and later replaced with a different proposal, which also didn’t have the buy-in.)
Probably the best candidate for this was hours spent on house things. I likely would have done something like tracking this in a spreadsheet and then turning the spreadsheet contents into something physical that became a banner in the common room; my inner Duncan would have started out with tracking on a whiteboard instead of a spreadsheet, or had people put pins into a piece of foamboard that was the banner.
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Some additional thoughts:
I don’t know if there’s any special advice I’d give myself about the Ghost separate from what’s already been said—if there are fewer and clearer expectations better followed up on by me, and if there’s a pre-move-in period where people can find out if they fit with those expectations better, and if there’s a gentle off-ramp, then I suspect the Ghost is less of a problem.
I’m currently writing this from a laptop in the front room (for other readers: we have three ‘common’ spaces, of which the front room is the most lounge/desk-type) with two other Dragons also in the room. This is fairly abnormal; typically I’m on my desktop all day, and my desktop is in my room.
My guess is that when we decided the physical layout of the house, we should have tried harder to have people with shared or small sleeping space and then shared desk/office space. (With owned desks, such that I could leave things on it / have my monitor wall-mounted / etc.) If my computer lived in a room with the computers of other Dragons, I would see much more of them (and they would see much more of me) by default.
I am not surprised by your disagreement; I think you are less … psychoactive? … on this axis than most-if-not-all of the other Dragons, and that more of this would not have meaningfully changed your experience. The increased confidence comes from nagging suspicions and intimations-of-doom from the near-beginning that kept turning out correct in various cases; it’s less that Dragon Army provided new evidence of microculture’s power, and more that it provided confirming evidence of the problems I intuited in its absence.
EDIT: I also have two widely-spaced and credible data points claiming that the causal arrow I’ve drawn between microculture and cohesion is a major part of why the Army does a lot of the things it does with jargon and rituals and hand gestures and weird tics about physical space. Like, not just that it’s a convenient projection after the fact, but that that’s why it is done and that its power has been tested and confirmed.
Nitpick: this would me that he causes fewer effects in others’ minds, whereas what you meant to say is that he is less acted-on (by the hand signals, etc.), right?
At least that was my understanding of how we were using that term.
I would be curious to hear some examples of the jargon and rituals and hand gestures and weird tics about physical space. (Mostly it’s just idle curiosity. I especially am not sure and thus curious what “weird tics about physical space” means. I’m also wondering how they compare to the examples in the fictional version of Dragon Army that you wrote up way back when.)
Microculture and cohesion? Did you go to any particularly cohesive summer camps when you were young? If not, you might want to talk to someone who did.
I went to a few different CTY sites, and found that 1) my ranking of sites by quality matched up almost perfectly with the consensus, 2) these matched up almost perfectly with the extent to which the traditions (i.e. microculture) existed.
One thing that stands out to me is that I went to one site at which the traditions had almost completely died out. (Siena, if anyone out there remembers better than I do.) The story I heard was that the Catholic college didn’t take too kindly to swarms of degenerate atheists watching Rocky Horror and so on on their campus and insisted that camp management do away with a lot of the traditions, the people who were the most into the traditions left for other sites in response, and with those few people gone, the traditions atrophied, and attendance at that site fell off a cliff. It shut down a few years after I went, and it deserved to go.
On the other hand, the site management was incompetent, so there’s that too.
Did you go to any particularly cohesive summer camps when you were young?
You asked this of Duncan, but I went to CTY twice; I remember my experience being dominated by the class I took, and didn’t really rank the two sites against each other at the time. I seem to be recall both of them seeming tradition-heavy.
[Context: I live in Dragon Army.]
I think it was good as a rationalist house, and something like 10-30% better than the rationalist house you would have had if the same group of people had just formed a house together without a clear structure. I also think it was basically a failure at the stated goals / house charter.
I’m also glad that we tried it, and would not advise past-me to not try it, and mostly agree with Duncan’s advice to past-Duncan. (I also expect to stick around for the next stage of the house, which will likely be a regular rationalist house with some more structure.)
Some parts I disagree with:
I don’t think that this was a major input into the outcome of the house, and am somewhat confused that you’re more convinced of this now. It feels like there were ~3 obviously important things that didn’t happen, ~6 things of uncertain importance that didn’t happen, and the project didn’t succeed; this state of affairs is basically equally likely in the world where those little things are make-or-break and the world where those little things are irrelevant. Where’s the Bayesian evidence coming from?
I don’t think the versions of this that we actually tried worked very well. My model here is that the core feature is having a good metric that people are bought into, and am pessimistic about versions of this without that feature. (The past versions that we tried were proposals of metrics, which people mostly didn’t buy into, and so after trying it out for three weeks or so it was abandoned and later replaced with a different proposal, which also didn’t have the buy-in.)
Probably the best candidate for this was hours spent on house things. I likely would have done something like tracking this in a spreadsheet and then turning the spreadsheet contents into something physical that became a banner in the common room; my inner Duncan would have started out with tracking on a whiteboard instead of a spreadsheet, or had people put pins into a piece of foamboard that was the banner.
---
Some additional thoughts:
I’m currently writing this from a laptop in the front room (for other readers: we have three ‘common’ spaces, of which the front room is the most lounge/desk-type) with two other Dragons also in the room. This is fairly abnormal; typically I’m on my desktop all day, and my desktop is in my room.
My guess is that when we decided the physical layout of the house, we should have tried harder to have people with shared or small sleeping space and then shared desk/office space. (With owned desks, such that I could leave things on it / have my monitor wall-mounted / etc.) If my computer lived in a room with the computers of other Dragons, I would see much more of them (and they would see much more of me) by default.
I am not surprised by your disagreement; I think you are less … psychoactive? … on this axis than most-if-not-all of the other Dragons, and that more of this would not have meaningfully changed your experience. The increased confidence comes from nagging suspicions and intimations-of-doom from the near-beginning that kept turning out correct in various cases; it’s less that Dragon Army provided new evidence of microculture’s power, and more that it provided confirming evidence of the problems I intuited in its absence.
EDIT: I also have two widely-spaced and credible data points claiming that the causal arrow I’ve drawn between microculture and cohesion is a major part of why the Army does a lot of the things it does with jargon and rituals and hand gestures and weird tics about physical space. Like, not just that it’s a convenient projection after the fact, but that that’s why it is done and that its power has been tested and confirmed.
Nitpick: this would me that he causes fewer effects in others’ minds, whereas what you meant to say is that he is less acted-on (by the hand signals, etc.), right?
At least that was my understanding of how we were using that term.
Right, sorry. Like the misuses of the word “aversive” when people say “I’m aversive to this.”
I would be curious to hear some examples of the jargon and rituals and hand gestures and weird tics about physical space. (Mostly it’s just idle curiosity. I especially am not sure and thus curious what “weird tics about physical space” means. I’m also wondering how they compare to the examples in the fictional version of Dragon Army that you wrote up way back when.)
Microculture and cohesion? Did you go to any particularly cohesive summer camps when you were young? If not, you might want to talk to someone who did.
I went to a few different CTY sites, and found that 1) my ranking of sites by quality matched up almost perfectly with the consensus, 2) these matched up almost perfectly with the extent to which the traditions (i.e. microculture) existed.
One thing that stands out to me is that I went to one site at which the traditions had almost completely died out. (Siena, if anyone out there remembers better than I do.) The story I heard was that the Catholic college didn’t take too kindly to swarms of degenerate atheists watching Rocky Horror and so on on their campus and insisted that camp management do away with a lot of the traditions, the people who were the most into the traditions left for other sites in response, and with those few people gone, the traditions atrophied, and attendance at that site fell off a cliff. It shut down a few years after I went, and it deserved to go.
On the other hand, the site management was incompetent, so there’s that too.
You asked this of Duncan, but I went to CTY twice; I remember my experience being dominated by the class I took, and didn’t really rank the two sites against each other at the time. I seem to be recall both of them seeming tradition-heavy.