But I think that potentially human group dynamics won’t work without something like “community-spiritedness”—there are benefits to having a community of hundreds or thousands, for instance, that you cannot accrue if you only give your time and attention to your ten best friends.
As for why this is a problem for LW specifically, I would probably point at age. The full explanation is too long for this comment, and so may become a post, but the basic idea is that ‘career consolidation’ is a developmental task that comes before ‘generativity’, or focusing mostly on shepherding the next generation, which comes before ‘guardianship’, or focusing mostly on preserving the important pieces of the past.
The community seems to have mostly retracted because people took the correct step of focusing on the next stage of their development, but because there hadn’t been enough people who had finished previous stages of their development, we didn’t have enough guardians. We may be able to build more directly, but it might only work the long way.
As for why this is a problem for LW specifically, I would probably point at age. The full explanation is too long for this comment, and so may become a post, but the basic idea is that ‘career consolidation’ is a developmental task that comes before ‘generativity’, or focusing mostly on shepherding the next generation, which comes before ‘guardianship’, or focusing mostly on preserving the important pieces of the past.
The community seems to have mostly retracted because people took the correct step of focusing on the next stage of their development, but because there hadn’t been enough people who had finished previous stages of their development, we didn’t have enough guardians. We may be able to build more directly, but it might only work the long way.
Sounds interesting. I’d love to read the post.