I expect it to fail. And I kind of wish you wouldn’t try: I give maybe a 1⁄4 chance this fails sufficiently dramatically and publicly that I become less willing to be associated with the community because people start associating it with that failure.
In particular, here is what I expect to happen (~60% confidence it goes down something like this):
Someone will start regularly defecting within the first three months. Maybe they don’t keep up with their chores, maybe they skip meetings, maybe they fail to get along with someone and they fight, maybe they persist in doing something they’ve been asked repeatedly not to do, maybe they chafe under your leadership and start practicing malicious compliance. I don’t expect intentional defection so much as executive dysfunction, to be clear, but it has the same effect either way.
You, personally, will lack the force of character or charisma to fix it. (I haven’t met you in person, so this might be way off; I’m just going off your writing and those of your pictures on Facebook I can see. But it takes an extraordinarily good manager to deal with this problem, and there’s nothing in your bio which implies you are one.) You also, not being legally their military superior, won’t have any actually worthwhile carrots or sticks to offer—this is the core problem, as I see it, that you lack the legal authority to properly enforce anything. Also, rationalists are weird, and often don’t respond that well to the usual incentives.
The rest of the house will lose confidence in your leadership as a consequence.
Bad things. I don’t actually know what happens at this step—people move out, or just stop playing by your rules and it reverts to a standard if unusually dysfunctional group house, or what.
Unfortunately I don’t have fixes to offer you here, other than “try to figure out an enforcement mechanism which will work even on rationalists and which you can legally carry out”. I can’t think of such an enforcement mechanism, but haven’t even put a full five minutes into it. Maybe you already have one in mind and I’ve missed it. To be clear, I don’t think “ostracism” will be remotely sufficient, because of the aforementioned weirdness and the fact that people will have other friends to fall back on. (I guess you could only invite people without other friends, or require them to cut off contact with said friends, but that is a terrible idea.) I also want to say that I’ve seen a number of other communities either fail or struggle due to lack of an explicitly specified and actually effective enforcement mechanism for their rules.
Tiny side note: I think it’s very important that members have regular one-on-one meetings with someone other than you, in case their problems are problems with you which they aren’t willing to bring up to your face.
Thanks for this detailed model. I had a sense of this as a failure mode, but I like the specific way you’ve expressed it.
I do actually have a fair bit of managerial skill. I dunno if it’s better than 1⁄100, but it’s at least in that range. I also completely agree about regular one-on-one meetings with other people; in part, that’s what the “pair debugging/rapport building” time commitment is. I wonder if you think it’s important that they be with a specific other person, or if you think just fostering lots of one-on-one communication hits the thing you’re gesturing toward?
A specific other person intuitively sounds better to me, but that might just be because that’s how it has been done in organizations I’ve been in. (Though it sounds hard to schedule if it’s not a specific person, otherwise, and it’s important that this be a regular thing with the specific topic of “talk about how things are going”, not just general spending time together.) Maybe your second in command, maybe a different person from the command structure—I assume there’s going to be people other than you with roles like “general household management” (I am thinking of office managers, if you’re familiar).
I don’t think the pair time accomplishes quite this. Having a specific time set aside for one-on-one meetings specifically as the regular opportunity to bring up issues means issues which might otherwise have stayed at the back of the mind get brought up more. Generic time spent together does not accomplish this. It’s approximately the same reason you want scheduled one-on-one meetings with everyone in the house despite presumably spending a lot of time with the people in the house in other contexts.
Hmmm. It might be good to install as a house norm that everyone has an outside advisor that they commit to checking in with, either once a week or biweekly. Like, someone not directly affiliated with Dragon Army in any way.
That’s only useful if the outside advisor has some level of veto power. I’d suggest something like allowing them to trigger a discussion meeting /outside of Dragon Army Territory/ with the advised, optionally including the Commander and/or other members, and also at the option of the advisor including legal counsel or a medical practitioner.
Not because I expect anyone to need the safeguards involved, but because making those explicitly part of the Expectations makes it harder to coerce somebody into not getting help. Making coercion of the type “You’re fine, no need to waste time and leaving your ingroup to try to explain to some /outsider/ what’s going on, they won’t understand anyway” ring red alarm bell flags is a feature.
Can I get contact info from you? I already have Malcolm’s; if there’s an email address you can use to send a message to TK17Studios at gmail dot com, I can then offer that address to anyone without an obvious check-in.
Can I get contact info from you? I already have Malcolm’s; if there’s an email address you can use to send a message to TK17Studios at gmail dot com, I can then offer that address to anyone without an obvious check-in.
This is a neat idea!
I expect it to fail. And I kind of wish you wouldn’t try: I give maybe a 1⁄4 chance this fails sufficiently dramatically and publicly that I become less willing to be associated with the community because people start associating it with that failure.
In particular, here is what I expect to happen (~60% confidence it goes down something like this):
Someone will start regularly defecting within the first three months. Maybe they don’t keep up with their chores, maybe they skip meetings, maybe they fail to get along with someone and they fight, maybe they persist in doing something they’ve been asked repeatedly not to do, maybe they chafe under your leadership and start practicing malicious compliance. I don’t expect intentional defection so much as executive dysfunction, to be clear, but it has the same effect either way.
You, personally, will lack the force of character or charisma to fix it. (I haven’t met you in person, so this might be way off; I’m just going off your writing and those of your pictures on Facebook I can see. But it takes an extraordinarily good manager to deal with this problem, and there’s nothing in your bio which implies you are one.) You also, not being legally their military superior, won’t have any actually worthwhile carrots or sticks to offer—this is the core problem, as I see it, that you lack the legal authority to properly enforce anything. Also, rationalists are weird, and often don’t respond that well to the usual incentives.
The rest of the house will lose confidence in your leadership as a consequence.
Bad things. I don’t actually know what happens at this step—people move out, or just stop playing by your rules and it reverts to a standard if unusually dysfunctional group house, or what.
Unfortunately I don’t have fixes to offer you here, other than “try to figure out an enforcement mechanism which will work even on rationalists and which you can legally carry out”. I can’t think of such an enforcement mechanism, but haven’t even put a full five minutes into it. Maybe you already have one in mind and I’ve missed it. To be clear, I don’t think “ostracism” will be remotely sufficient, because of the aforementioned weirdness and the fact that people will have other friends to fall back on. (I guess you could only invite people without other friends, or require them to cut off contact with said friends, but that is a terrible idea.) I also want to say that I’ve seen a number of other communities either fail or struggle due to lack of an explicitly specified and actually effective enforcement mechanism for their rules.
Tiny side note: I think it’s very important that members have regular one-on-one meetings with someone other than you, in case their problems are problems with you which they aren’t willing to bring up to your face.
Thanks for this detailed model. I had a sense of this as a failure mode, but I like the specific way you’ve expressed it.
I do actually have a fair bit of managerial skill. I dunno if it’s better than 1⁄100, but it’s at least in that range. I also completely agree about regular one-on-one meetings with other people; in part, that’s what the “pair debugging/rapport building” time commitment is. I wonder if you think it’s important that they be with a specific other person, or if you think just fostering lots of one-on-one communication hits the thing you’re gesturing toward?
A specific other person intuitively sounds better to me, but that might just be because that’s how it has been done in organizations I’ve been in. (Though it sounds hard to schedule if it’s not a specific person, otherwise, and it’s important that this be a regular thing with the specific topic of “talk about how things are going”, not just general spending time together.) Maybe your second in command, maybe a different person from the command structure—I assume there’s going to be people other than you with roles like “general household management” (I am thinking of office managers, if you’re familiar).
I don’t think the pair time accomplishes quite this. Having a specific time set aside for one-on-one meetings specifically as the regular opportunity to bring up issues means issues which might otherwise have stayed at the back of the mind get brought up more. Generic time spent together does not accomplish this. It’s approximately the same reason you want scheduled one-on-one meetings with everyone in the house despite presumably spending a lot of time with the people in the house in other contexts.
Hmmm. It might be good to install as a house norm that everyone has an outside advisor that they commit to checking in with, either once a week or biweekly. Like, someone not directly affiliated with Dragon Army in any way.
That’s only useful if the outside advisor has some level of veto power. I’d suggest something like allowing them to trigger a discussion meeting /outside of Dragon Army Territory/ with the advised, optionally including the Commander and/or other members, and also at the option of the advisor including legal counsel or a medical practitioner.
Not because I expect anyone to need the safeguards involved, but because making those explicitly part of the Expectations makes it harder to coerce somebody into not getting help. Making coercion of the type “You’re fine, no need to waste time and leaving your ingroup to try to explain to some /outsider/ what’s going on, they won’t understand anyway” ring red alarm bell flags is a feature.
upvote
I am open to being an outside advisor / buddy / contact etc to individuals within this and/or with the project as a whole.
Me too!
Can I get contact info from you? I already have Malcolm’s; if there’s an email address you can use to send a message to TK17Studios at gmail dot com, I can then offer that address to anyone without an obvious check-in.
Sent.
Throwing in with Malcolm as interested in being an outside sanity check.
Can I get contact info from you? I already have Malcolm’s; if there’s an email address you can use to send a message to TK17Studios at gmail dot com, I can then offer that address to anyone without an obvious check-in.