1) I agree with the very high-level point that there are lots of rationalist group houses with flat / egalitarian structures, and so it might make sense to try one that’s more authoritarian to see how that works. Sincere kudos to you for forming a concrete experimental plan and discussing it in public.
2) I don’t think I’ve met you or heard of you before, and my first impression of you from your blog post is that you are very hungry for power. Like, you sound like you would really, really enjoy being the chief of a tribe, bossing people around, having people look up to you as their leader, feeling like an alpha male, etc. The main reason this makes me uncomfortable is that I don’t see you owning this desire anywhere in your long post. Like, if you had said, just once, “I think I would enjoy being a leader, and I think you might enjoy being led by me,” I would feel calmer. Instead I’m worried that you have convinced yourself that you are grudgingly stepping up as a leader because it’s necessary and no one else will. If you’re not being fully honest about your motivations for nominating yourself to be an authoritarian leader, what else are you hiding?
3) Your post has a very high ratio of detailed proposals to literature review. I would have liked to see you discuss other group houses in more detail, make reference to articles or books or blog posts about the theory of cohousing and of utopian communities more generally, or otherwise demonstrate that you have done your homework to find out what has worked, what has not worked, and why. None of your proposals sound obviously bad to me, and you’ve clearly put some thought and care into articulating them, but it’s not clear whether your proposals are backed up by research, or whether you’re just reasoning from your armchair.
4) Why should anyone follow you on an epic journey to improve their time management skills if you’re sleep-deprived and behind schedule on writing a blog post? Don’t you need to be more or less in control of your own lifestyle before you can lead others to improve theirs?
I don’t think I’ve met you or heard of you before, and my first impression of you from your blog post is that you are very hungry for power. Like, you sound like you would really, really enjoy being the chief of a tribe, bossing people around, having people look up to you as their leader, feeling like an alpha male, etc.
As someone who knows Duncan moderately well in person and has been under his leadership in a few contexts (CFAR instructor training and the recent Dragon Army experiment), I can confirm that this is nowhere close to true. What Duncan is hungry for is for the world to be better, and he thinks as a contingent fact that being the chief of this particular tribe is the best way for him to do that. I agree with Duncan’s assessment of himself that if someone else stepped up to do the thing he would breathe an enormous sigh of relief, rather than be in any way jealous.
Why should anyone follow you on an epic journey to improve their time management skills if you’re sleep-deprived and behind schedule on writing a blog post?
It depends on how urgent you think Duncan thinks having this blog post out sooner rather than later is. If Duncan were optimizing for looking like he has his shit together he could have either just not mentioned that he was sleep-deprived and behind schedule, or he could have gotten more sleep and fallen further behind schedule. Instead he posted the blog post, and went out of his way to mention that he was sleep-deprived and behind schedule, because he is optimizing for something else.
2) Nope, you’re just way off (though I appreciate the candor). I thought about coming up with some sort of epistemically humble “maybe” or “I can see where you got that impression,” but it seems more advisable to simply be direct, and to sound as confident as I am. I’ve been a leader, and I’ve been a follower, and I’ve transitioned in both directions within the same contexts, and there’s no special draw there along any of the lines you laid out. In particular, I think the statement “this needs to happen, and no one else is going to do it” is actually true; if some contender wants to stand up and credibly claim they can pull this off better than me, I will IMMEDIATELY hand them the baton and breathe a sigh of relief—my actual favorite place to be is second or third in command.
Feel free to PM me if you’re actually curious about my history, or to poke around my reputation within the community, or to ask any of the dozen or so people who’ve worked with me for a couple of years, or the twenty people who attended the dry run experiment last week (I can point you in their direction more specifically, also through PM).
(I also considered whether to update/change my tone given your first impression, but it seems to be enough of an outlier that I probably won’t make any deliberate effort.)
3) I think you and I might disagree fairly strongly on the importance/value/worth of “the literature” in this arena. Part of the whole point here is that I have a solid inside view developed from a unique set of experiences that a lot of other people are doing it wrong. I think there’s some value in literature review (e.g. the sources that Benquo listed up above seem worth at least an afternoon’s perusing), but in three separate fields I’ve found that my idiosyncratic ideas that everyone said contradicted the literature and wouldn’t work did, in fact, work, and produced excellent results; I’m not actually convinced that there’s enough EV to justify more than a quick, 80⁄20 skim of the available info. I’m currently reasoning from my armchair—that’s a fair point. But also the whole screed is “let’s get down to the business of running experiments and gathering data,” and I note again that we did already do a test weekend that gave promising preliminary support to a lot of my models and claims.
4) Another quite sound/reasonable criticism, taking the outside view with no priors to add detail to your model. In point of fact, though, it’s been a 90th percentile unusual month (I’m the curriculum director in an org that just ran its most ambitious sprint of events to date, including bringing in a round of new employees whose training I was almost entirely responsible for, and then since that ended I’ve been churning hard on this project), and it’s not particularly strong evidence about other months. Also, I think it’s reasonable to posit that one needs to be more or less in control before leading others, but I note it’s not obvious—I can clearly envision (for instance) models in which one person sacrifices themselves to push everyone else forward. That’s not what I plan to do, but the picture isn’t as straightforward as a clever-sounding false equivalency.
Also, lastly, remember the house is supposed to help me, too:
I personally feel that I am operating far below my healthy sustainable maximum capacity, and I’m not alone in that, and something like Dragon Army could help.
I’m not the only one with skills, and a big part of it is creating a construct that I can use to level up and improve. The part where I impose structure is separate from the part where maybe I could leverage social pressure to improve my own workflow.
I think the statement “this needs to happen, and no one else is going to do it” is actually true
Can you point to some reasons why you believe that an authoritarian commune is a good idea (besides “let’s try and see what this button does”)?
in three separate fields I’ve found that my idiosyncratic ideas that everyone said contradicted the literature and wouldn’t work did, in fact, work, and produced excellent results
“Who needs literature, I’m smarter than all of them” is a worrisome attitude. By the way, did you check what the literature actually said? In my experience what “everyone says” literature claims is usually NOT what the literature really claims.
the whole screed is “let’s get down to the business of running experiments and gathering data,”
What is the price for the experiment and who will pay it?
Er … I think the whole post above is all about answering your first question? I’m confused, and feel somewhat strawmanned by the summary “let’s try it and see what this button does.” Because high-commitment, high-structure environments have a long, long history of being actually productive and useful and net-good for a lot of the people that go through them, and ought to be in the toolkit despite their known failure modes, and given the rationalist community’s strong predilections towards individualism, prioritizing flexibility and following short-term motivation, and not committing to things, it seemed naive to expect that a high-commitment, high-structure environment would come into existence via committee. Note that, while not super emphasized in the post above, a major assumption is “if I’m right, I should be able to largely put down the baton six months in when the thing is clearly working,” i.e. it’s more about the structure than the authoritarianism specifically (the authoritarianism being simply a necessary catalyst imo).
The price for the experiment is largely distributed across its members; it’s the money involved in housing and whatever difficulty people suffer from giving up a not-insignificant-but-overall-fairly-small fraction of their agency and self-determination. It’s roughly analogous, I think, to the price one pays to become a black belt, only condensed down into six months rather than spread across several years.
As far as “who needs literature, I’m smarter than all of them” being worrisome—I’m okay with people being worried. Those people are being actively encouraged to influence things here, and also the whole system is based on iteration, and also I object to the strawmanning again (I’ve said more than once that there’s some value to be had there, but am being summed up as rejecting it entirely), and also I am, in fact, smarter than a lot of them. Not all, but a lot, and it’s been proven before in multiple domains, and I’d be an idiot to ignore that.
I’m confused, and feel somewhat strawmanned by the summary “let’s try it and see what this button does.”
That wasn’t a summary of your position, that was a straw counterpoint for you to kick :-)
high-commitment, high-structure environments have a long, long history of being actually productive
Well… it’s complicated. Such environments are good for producing tools for a purpose. Cogs in a machine, maybe, or mass-produced minds from the same mold, or even cannon fodder if you’re unlucky—note that the military is the prototypical “high-commitment, high-structure” institution.
Having tools is certainly productive from the point of the view of the purpose. And it is true that some (maybe many) people feel that being a tool gives you a purposeful life, better than being pointlessly adrift. But, as I said, it’s complicated :-/
it’s more about the structure than the authoritarianism specifically
Structure needs to be enforced—otherwise everyone could easily set up the needed amount of structure in their life themselves. The point of the exercise is, basically, “I will organize your life for you” and that doesn’t work in the no-stick all-carrot setups.
I guess the concept I worry about is responsibility: if you will organize my life for me, you become responsible for it while my responsibility diminishes.
I am, in fact, smarter than a lot of them
That’s a good thing to be, but not necessarily to believe in :-D
In any case, I’m not saying you should do what the literature says, I’m saying you should know what the literature says, and not on the basis of hearsay either.
The price for the experiment is largely distributed across its members
Yes. The price (I’m mostly speaking about things other than money) is uncertain, in statistical terms it’s a random variable with a particular distribution. The question is how far the tail stretches: how bad is the worst-case scenario?
I think the point of the exercise is less “I will organize your life for you,” and more “we will reduce our ability to hide from one another, and therefore all be more likely to conform to our shared sense of that-which-is-endorsed.” The “I will organize” part is more “I will get us all together and turn on some of the relevant and hopefully-appropriate spotlights, and then moderate the discussion about which spotlights should turn back off.”
I have hopes that we can see the worst-case scenarios coming in time to avert them or eject, and that therefore the effective worst-case scenario is basically something like “I had a rough six months and have to find another room to rent again.”
Strong agreement with basically everything you say above.
Can you point to some reasons why you believe that an authoritarian commune is a good idea (besides “let’s try and see what this button does”)?
Because in real world there are many successful authoritarian organisations? More or less every company you heard about is de facto authoritarian inside (sure, there are exceptions, too).
Because “our kind” seems to have bias against coordination, and an authoritarian leadership is a possible way to solve it?
Because in real world there are many successful authoritarian organisations?
The issue isn’t so much “authoritarian” as it is the combination of “authoritarian” and “commune”.
Communes tend to be totalitarian and this one is explicitly set up as such (high-commitment, full-immersion, etc.) This makes it a dangerous environment—if people mention noticing the skulls, that’s because there are a LOT of skulls. “Authoritarian” means submission to the authority and in a totalitarian context that means total submission.
Authoritarian organizations like companies merely claim about 40 hours of your time per week plus obedience to a set of mostly external rules. And, of course, they pay you recognizing that their claim is a burden on you :-)
I understand where the impulse comes from: grassroots left is notoriously disorganized with the Occupy movement having been, perhaps, the peak of that—no leadership, no specific demands, lots of talking, zero achieved. But I would be a lot more comfortable with a “normal” goal-directed organization which focuses on external goals and not on molding the minds of its members. I’m very suspicious of mind-molding.
Besides, Duncan’s comments throughout the last week left me with grave doubts about his suitability to lead this kind of project. Low credence, of course, since I’m reacting merely to an internet persona and not to someone I know in real life, but my opinion of that persona took a marked turn to the worse.
an authoritarian leadership is a possible way to solve it?
Sure, it’s a possible way. I’m concerned with the cost / benefit ratio, though. Plus benevolent God Emperors are in short supply.
Not in the sense that the secret police will check your underwear drawer for forbidden literature, but in the sense that they require conforming in more encompassing and more personal ways than the usual institutions of the society (like a workplace or a college, etc.)
Note that things which are basically shared living arrangements on a smaller or larger scale are sometimes called communes even though they don’t requite active integration into the life of that mini-society—I don’t have those in mind.
And, of course, this totalitarianism is not a binary variable but an axis with, essentially, a solitary isolated individual at one end and a hive mind on another.
I disagree about 2. After having (a) participated in the weekend experiment and (b) done some “back-channel” references on Duncan, my impression is that he hates the fact that leadership will isolate him from the group he really wants to be a part of. I expect that if the experiment is successful, Duncan will eagerly set aside leadership and integrate himself with the group.
1) I agree with the very high-level point that there are lots of rationalist group houses with flat / egalitarian structures, and so it might make sense to try one that’s more authoritarian to see how that works. Sincere kudos to you for forming a concrete experimental plan and discussing it in public.
2) I don’t think I’ve met you or heard of you before, and my first impression of you from your blog post is that you are very hungry for power. Like, you sound like you would really, really enjoy being the chief of a tribe, bossing people around, having people look up to you as their leader, feeling like an alpha male, etc. The main reason this makes me uncomfortable is that I don’t see you owning this desire anywhere in your long post. Like, if you had said, just once, “I think I would enjoy being a leader, and I think you might enjoy being led by me,” I would feel calmer. Instead I’m worried that you have convinced yourself that you are grudgingly stepping up as a leader because it’s necessary and no one else will. If you’re not being fully honest about your motivations for nominating yourself to be an authoritarian leader, what else are you hiding?
3) Your post has a very high ratio of detailed proposals to literature review. I would have liked to see you discuss other group houses in more detail, make reference to articles or books or blog posts about the theory of cohousing and of utopian communities more generally, or otherwise demonstrate that you have done your homework to find out what has worked, what has not worked, and why. None of your proposals sound obviously bad to me, and you’ve clearly put some thought and care into articulating them, but it’s not clear whether your proposals are backed up by research, or whether you’re just reasoning from your armchair.
4) Why should anyone follow you on an epic journey to improve their time management skills if you’re sleep-deprived and behind schedule on writing a blog post? Don’t you need to be more or less in control of your own lifestyle before you can lead others to improve theirs?
As someone who knows Duncan moderately well in person and has been under his leadership in a few contexts (CFAR instructor training and the recent Dragon Army experiment), I can confirm that this is nowhere close to true. What Duncan is hungry for is for the world to be better, and he thinks as a contingent fact that being the chief of this particular tribe is the best way for him to do that. I agree with Duncan’s assessment of himself that if someone else stepped up to do the thing he would breathe an enormous sigh of relief, rather than be in any way jealous.
It depends on how urgent you think Duncan thinks having this blog post out sooner rather than later is. If Duncan were optimizing for looking like he has his shit together he could have either just not mentioned that he was sleep-deprived and behind schedule, or he could have gotten more sleep and fallen further behind schedule. Instead he posted the blog post, and went out of his way to mention that he was sleep-deprived and behind schedule, because he is optimizing for something else.
1) Thanks.
2) Nope, you’re just way off (though I appreciate the candor). I thought about coming up with some sort of epistemically humble “maybe” or “I can see where you got that impression,” but it seems more advisable to simply be direct, and to sound as confident as I am. I’ve been a leader, and I’ve been a follower, and I’ve transitioned in both directions within the same contexts, and there’s no special draw there along any of the lines you laid out. In particular, I think the statement “this needs to happen, and no one else is going to do it” is actually true; if some contender wants to stand up and credibly claim they can pull this off better than me, I will IMMEDIATELY hand them the baton and breathe a sigh of relief—my actual favorite place to be is second or third in command.
Feel free to PM me if you’re actually curious about my history, or to poke around my reputation within the community, or to ask any of the dozen or so people who’ve worked with me for a couple of years, or the twenty people who attended the dry run experiment last week (I can point you in their direction more specifically, also through PM).
(I also considered whether to update/change my tone given your first impression, but it seems to be enough of an outlier that I probably won’t make any deliberate effort.)
3) I think you and I might disagree fairly strongly on the importance/value/worth of “the literature” in this arena. Part of the whole point here is that I have a solid inside view developed from a unique set of experiences that a lot of other people are doing it wrong. I think there’s some value in literature review (e.g. the sources that Benquo listed up above seem worth at least an afternoon’s perusing), but in three separate fields I’ve found that my idiosyncratic ideas that everyone said contradicted the literature and wouldn’t work did, in fact, work, and produced excellent results; I’m not actually convinced that there’s enough EV to justify more than a quick, 80⁄20 skim of the available info. I’m currently reasoning from my armchair—that’s a fair point. But also the whole screed is “let’s get down to the business of running experiments and gathering data,” and I note again that we did already do a test weekend that gave promising preliminary support to a lot of my models and claims.
4) Another quite sound/reasonable criticism, taking the outside view with no priors to add detail to your model. In point of fact, though, it’s been a 90th percentile unusual month (I’m the curriculum director in an org that just ran its most ambitious sprint of events to date, including bringing in a round of new employees whose training I was almost entirely responsible for, and then since that ended I’ve been churning hard on this project), and it’s not particularly strong evidence about other months. Also, I think it’s reasonable to posit that one needs to be more or less in control before leading others, but I note it’s not obvious—I can clearly envision (for instance) models in which one person sacrifices themselves to push everyone else forward. That’s not what I plan to do, but the picture isn’t as straightforward as a clever-sounding false equivalency.
Also, lastly, remember the house is supposed to help me, too:
I’m not the only one with skills, and a big part of it is creating a construct that I can use to level up and improve. The part where I impose structure is separate from the part where maybe I could leverage social pressure to improve my own workflow.
Can you point to some reasons why you believe that an authoritarian commune is a good idea (besides “let’s try and see what this button does”)?
“Who needs literature, I’m smarter than all of them” is a worrisome attitude. By the way, did you check what the literature actually said? In my experience what “everyone says” literature claims is usually NOT what the literature really claims.
What is the price for the experiment and who will pay it?
Er … I think the whole post above is all about answering your first question? I’m confused, and feel somewhat strawmanned by the summary “let’s try it and see what this button does.” Because high-commitment, high-structure environments have a long, long history of being actually productive and useful and net-good for a lot of the people that go through them, and ought to be in the toolkit despite their known failure modes, and given the rationalist community’s strong predilections towards individualism, prioritizing flexibility and following short-term motivation, and not committing to things, it seemed naive to expect that a high-commitment, high-structure environment would come into existence via committee. Note that, while not super emphasized in the post above, a major assumption is “if I’m right, I should be able to largely put down the baton six months in when the thing is clearly working,” i.e. it’s more about the structure than the authoritarianism specifically (the authoritarianism being simply a necessary catalyst imo).
The price for the experiment is largely distributed across its members; it’s the money involved in housing and whatever difficulty people suffer from giving up a not-insignificant-but-overall-fairly-small fraction of their agency and self-determination. It’s roughly analogous, I think, to the price one pays to become a black belt, only condensed down into six months rather than spread across several years.
As far as “who needs literature, I’m smarter than all of them” being worrisome—I’m okay with people being worried. Those people are being actively encouraged to influence things here, and also the whole system is based on iteration, and also I object to the strawmanning again (I’ve said more than once that there’s some value to be had there, but am being summed up as rejecting it entirely), and also I am, in fact, smarter than a lot of them. Not all, but a lot, and it’s been proven before in multiple domains, and I’d be an idiot to ignore that.
That wasn’t a summary of your position, that was a straw counterpoint for you to kick :-)
Well… it’s complicated. Such environments are good for producing tools for a purpose. Cogs in a machine, maybe, or mass-produced minds from the same mold, or even cannon fodder if you’re unlucky—note that the military is the prototypical “high-commitment, high-structure” institution.
Having tools is certainly productive from the point of the view of the purpose. And it is true that some (maybe many) people feel that being a tool gives you a purposeful life, better than being pointlessly adrift. But, as I said, it’s complicated :-/
Structure needs to be enforced—otherwise everyone could easily set up the needed amount of structure in their life themselves. The point of the exercise is, basically, “I will organize your life for you” and that doesn’t work in the no-stick all-carrot setups.
I guess the concept I worry about is responsibility: if you will organize my life for me, you become responsible for it while my responsibility diminishes.
That’s a good thing to be, but not necessarily to believe in :-D
In any case, I’m not saying you should do what the literature says, I’m saying you should know what the literature says, and not on the basis of hearsay either.
Yes. The price (I’m mostly speaking about things other than money) is uncertain, in statistical terms it’s a random variable with a particular distribution. The question is how far the tail stretches: how bad is the worst-case scenario?
Ah, gotcha. Thanks. =)
I think the point of the exercise is less “I will organize your life for you,” and more “we will reduce our ability to hide from one another, and therefore all be more likely to conform to our shared sense of that-which-is-endorsed.” The “I will organize” part is more “I will get us all together and turn on some of the relevant and hopefully-appropriate spotlights, and then moderate the discussion about which spotlights should turn back off.”
I have hopes that we can see the worst-case scenarios coming in time to avert them or eject, and that therefore the effective worst-case scenario is basically something like “I had a rough six months and have to find another room to rent again.”
Strong agreement with basically everything you say above.
Because in real world there are many successful authoritarian organisations? More or less every company you heard about is de facto authoritarian inside (sure, there are exceptions, too).
Because “our kind” seems to have bias against coordination, and an authoritarian leadership is a possible way to solve it?
Volunteers.
The issue isn’t so much “authoritarian” as it is the combination of “authoritarian” and “commune”.
Communes tend to be totalitarian and this one is explicitly set up as such (high-commitment, full-immersion, etc.) This makes it a dangerous environment—if people mention noticing the skulls, that’s because there are a LOT of skulls. “Authoritarian” means submission to the authority and in a totalitarian context that means total submission.
Authoritarian organizations like companies merely claim about 40 hours of your time per week plus obedience to a set of mostly external rules. And, of course, they pay you recognizing that their claim is a burden on you :-)
I understand where the impulse comes from: grassroots left is notoriously disorganized with the Occupy movement having been, perhaps, the peak of that—no leadership, no specific demands, lots of talking, zero achieved. But I would be a lot more comfortable with a “normal” goal-directed organization which focuses on external goals and not on molding the minds of its members. I’m very suspicious of mind-molding.
Besides, Duncan’s comments throughout the last week left me with grave doubts about his suitability to lead this kind of project. Low credence, of course, since I’m reacting merely to an internet persona and not to someone I know in real life, but my opinion of that persona took a marked turn to the worse.
Sure, it’s a possible way. I’m concerned with the cost / benefit ratio, though. Plus benevolent God Emperors are in short supply.
Cite? The kinds of communes my friends and acquaintances have lived in, haven’t seemed totalitarian at all.
Not in the sense that the secret police will check your underwear drawer for forbidden literature, but in the sense that they require conforming in more encompassing and more personal ways than the usual institutions of the society (like a workplace or a college, etc.)
Note that things which are basically shared living arrangements on a smaller or larger scale are sometimes called communes even though they don’t requite active integration into the life of that mini-society—I don’t have those in mind.
And, of course, this totalitarianism is not a binary variable but an axis with, essentially, a solitary isolated individual at one end and a hive mind on another.
I agree that 4 is a concern.
I disagree about 2. After having (a) participated in the weekend experiment and (b) done some “back-channel” references on Duncan, my impression is that he hates the fact that leadership will isolate him from the group he really wants to be a part of. I expect that if the experiment is successful, Duncan will eagerly set aside leadership and integrate himself with the group.