If you have an event you’re running, or an online space that you control, or an organization you run, you can set the norms. Rather than opting-by-default into the generic average norms of your peers, you can say “This is a space specifically for X. If you want to participate, you will need to hold yourself to Y particular standard.”
Learning a new set of norms/standards and sticking to them in the right contexts is often not easy. Getting a bunch of other people to choose to do so seems likely to be harder. (Although that’s just my immediate sense of how it is; it may be completely wrong…)
Thus, I have a weak expectation that this will only work well when participants and organizers are fairly good at deliberate standard-following and standard-establishing, respectively. Which actually seems like something the rationalist community is pretty good at, but it might still be worth giving some thought to how to be better at it.
In practice, if you’re building an organization, you may not have time to do “proper science”—you may need to get a group working ASAP, and you may need to test a few ideas at once to have a chance at succ
Learning a new set of norms/standards and sticking to them in the right contexts is often not easy. Getting a bunch of other people to choose to do so seems likely to be harder. (Although that’s just my immediate sense of how it is; it may be completely wrong…)
Yeah, definitely correct that this is a necessary subskill and there are some groups of people where this is really hard because the meta-norms are all about freethinking individuality (and the rationality community comes from roots that often have that).
But I think enforcing norms for the first time mostly just (“just”) requires you to be generally good public speaking (the sort of commanding tone you need to get people to do anything, normswise or otherwise, which I think is an important skill for meetup organizers to acquire no matter what, and if you’ve got the “comfortable talking in front of people” thing down the “get people do things” part I think is easy-ish)
Including in a meetup announcement “this meetup will be following X norms”, and then saying it again at the beginning of the meetup usually works fairly well in my experience.
Learning a new set of norms/standards and sticking to them in the right contexts is often not easy. Getting a bunch of other people to choose to do so seems likely to be harder. (Although that’s just my immediate sense of how it is; it may be completely wrong…)
Thus, I have a weak expectation that this will only work well when participants and organizers are fairly good at deliberate standard-following and standard-establishing, respectively. Which actually seems like something the rationalist community is pretty good at, but it might still be worth giving some thought to how to be better at it.
You’re missing the end of a word there.
Yeah, definitely correct that this is a necessary subskill and there are some groups of people where this is really hard because the meta-norms are all about freethinking individuality (and the rationality community comes from roots that often have that).
But I think enforcing norms for the first time mostly just (“just”) requires you to be generally good public speaking (the sort of commanding tone you need to get people to do anything, normswise or otherwise, which I think is an important skill for meetup organizers to acquire no matter what, and if you’ve got the “comfortable talking in front of people” thing down the “get people do things” part I think is easy-ish)
Including in a meetup announcement “this meetup will be following X norms”, and then saying it again at the beginning of the meetup usually works fairly well in my experience.