I am pessimistic about this. Not just because of the potential for Successful Bad Ideas; that’s already happened within the rationalist community without an explicit decision to archipelagize (uncontroversially, Leverage, and, more controversially, postrationalism). But also because a fractured community is vulnerable, and I expect this to cause or accelerate fracture. We’re already using different norms in different places; Tumblr/Twitter/LessWrong 1.0/Facebook, Bay vs. non-Bay, Berkeley vs. SF vs. South Bay. I don’t think this needs more pushes to diverge.
In fact, to the extent I’m working on community issues it’s trying to find means of strengthening ties. My pro-epistemic holiday creation project is trying to find things to reinforce the shared features without tying us to any subculture. I think this is more needed at the present moment.
I agree that fracturing is a risk (that should have made my earlier list), and I think it’s a fair question to ask “how do you expect Archipelago to handle that risk?”. (I do have some answers to that)
My counter question is “if you’re not doing something Archipelago-like, how do you handle genuine conflict over what norms should exist?” (the same question I’d ask any group that’s attempting to resolve things via vague consensus)
I also argue:
Archipelago is happening by default anyway, only badly/haphazardly
People want different things. People are naturally isolated due to accident of geography and “which parts of the internet feel most comfortable?” and “people cluster in small groups for social reasons” and “people tend to like interacting with particular types of people.”
I think if you are dissatisfied with that, you need to take particular countermeaures. Those countermeasures depend on which sub-problem you’re solving, and I think those countermeasures are largely orthogonal to Doing Archipelago On Purpose.
People who want popular things can get their thing represented at larger spaces. People who want unpopular things are screwed, and may ultimately decide to leave.
The reason I’m motivated to do this is the first place is that putting continuous effort into things is unpopular, and this applies to things ostensibly part of The Rationalist Shtick. (It’s not unpopular in a “people feel it’s unpopular” sense, just a “hard things are hard, therefore most people don’t do them sense”)
(Note that you can find people who put continuous effort into things and hang out with them, but the gatekeeping is entirely via vague-social-networking. One goal of On-Purpose-Archipelago is to make it easier for public facing groups to have standards.)
Metaphorical UniGov?
A section I probably should have included in the original essay is “what role does centralization play here?” In geopolitical Archipelago, Scott suggests a “UniGov” that everyone pays taxes to, whose job is to punish defectors, to provide education about different islands, and to be an inoffensive place for people to live if they have nowhere else to go.
Do we need a version of that? I think yes, but the implementation details might be different enough that it’s probably better not to try and force the metaphor to work.
I think there should be period large, public facing events, intended as a place for people from different subcultures to mingle and either generically bond (Solstice type things), or present their best ideas (Unconferences, CFAR Reunion [expensive but public facing]).
(I don’t currently believe smaller events can serve this purpose. A specific small event might bridge between two small groups in a specific fashion, but not act as a general-purpose-improve-connection-across-the-subsubcultures. I suppose lots of smaller events can do this collectively, although I would bet against this as a working systematic solution)
[Aside—Epistemic Habit, notice opportunity to operationalize prediction]
I want to say something in favor of haphazard archipelagos!
I think that it can often be a case of James Scott-ian local knowledge. Certain norms may naturally evolve because they are suited to the people who evolve them, in a way it’s hard to imitate through conscious norm design (because you can’t predict people’s needs, or you can’t come up with as clever solutions as the hivemind can, or whatever). In general, people can do a lot of really clever social cognition subconsciously that is really hard to explain consciously (this is why social skills classes are so bad).
To be clear, I am absolutely behind deliberate subculture design (with reasonable safeguards to avoid institutionally abusive communities); I am pretty much always in favor of more experimentation and more empiricism. But I also think that “haphazard archipelago” is not the same as “bad archipelago”.
I think the existing system is basically an ad-hoc filtering system that meets the social goals of many othe peoplealready in it. I’m not sure whether it works for finding people who are competent when you need competent people. (It might be doing a reasonable job of filtering for some combo of “competentish and a person you want to hang out with”)
Three problems that seem like they need solving are:
1) It’s hard for newcomers (or even, “moderately-old-timers” to network their way into the existing social groups). This sucks for them.
2) I seem to run into people who do end up in one sub-community but don’t really know which the other ones are or how to find them.
3) The aforementioned “none of the subcultures actually do quite the thing I want”.
4) I worry that the system filters more for “people’s ability to proactively navigate social clusters” then it filters for any other particular kind of competence.
I consider that there is a proof of concept of small events, regularly done and shared, providing enough common connection that there is centralization: American civic religion. Thanksgiving is a small event (usually) with a lot of variation and a few core components. People do all kinds of things on the 4th of July, but there will be some fireworks in there and some red white and blue. The Super Bowl is one our tribe generally opts out of, but it’s widely shared and also mostly small events.
None of that provides connection as strong as an Amish or Orthodox Jewish community, but it’s competitive with Twice-A-Year Catholics/Jews who show up just for the big ceremonies.
If regular small events provide cultural touchstones that any two small groups can bridge to each other, that’s useful as glue for conversation and cross-fertilization, which I think is more important. And they’re less epistemically dangerous than a clapping-along groupthink ceremony like Solstice.
Hmm. So, I certainly support more small events like you describe, but I’m not sure I grok what your goal with them is.
“American Civic Religion is competitive with twice-a-year Catholics” sounds true, but Broader-Rationality-Culture already seems at-least-as-good as both of those.
i.e, with Modern American Christmas, there’s a range of activities ranging from “singing songs drunkenly” to “quiet Midnight Mass” to “just visiting your relatives for dinner” to “watching the Rockettes at Rockerfeller center”.
LessWrong-descended-culture already seems to essentially be the sort of “twice a year Catholics/Jews” esque culture, with religish-holiday-esque-Winter-Solstice, general-festival-esque Summer Solstice, and CFAR Alumni Reunion and EA Global as non-religion-flavored things.
My impression is that your concern is more like “not liking that approach to establishing broader connection”.
My point is that clearly, small events are effective at sustaining ties, and so we should have some. I also am very suspicious of some common elements like singing in unison. They’re common enough to be perceived as secular, and so not given the same skepticism as explicit trappings of religion. I think this is a mistake. They have a literally hypnotic effect such that they tend to override standard skeptical filters, and I don’t see them as any less dangerous to epistemics when they are used to promote a fairly-good ideology.
My concern is that. used uncarefully, complex ceremonies and ritual creates belief system lock-in. The more you include, the more content you are embedding that is bypassing evidence-based reasoning and getting treated as true until the audience thinks to question it. Knowing that even the best belief system assuredly has flaws, I think it is wrong to do this any more than absolutely necessary.
So, there’s obviously a bunch of disagreements I have there, but they don’t feel like they’re touching on any of my cruxes. (I listed four major events, only one of which was especially ritualized. I feel like my arguments stay mostly the same in a parallel world where Solstice doesn’t exist)
I do agree that there should be more small events of the sort you describe. I’m not as excited about them as you because I think it’s a lot harder to get lots of people to do a distributed small event than a big event.
I also just don’t feel a need for that many repeated events, large or small, and I feel close-to-saturated on them. (to add an additional repeated event, I’d either need to sacrifice a currently-in-rotation repeat event, or sacrifice the ability to try new things)
I wonder whether creating and splitting off the subgroups could actually be a mechanism to preserve the large community. Some people seem to come to LW meetups for wrong reasons; for example they prefer clever arguing and ignore the science; it would be nice to have them form the separate “clever arguers club” and leave. If people sort themselves out, everyone is saved the unpleasantness of having to kick out people who clearly don’t belong and disrupt the goals of the group. (“Let the heretics leave peacefully.”)
But of course this has the risk that the disruptive people would prefer to stay in the majority group (e.g. a disruptive clever arguer may dislike the presence of other clever arguers); or simply have enough time to participate in all subgroups.
I actually think Leverage is not an instance of a bad idea getting too[1] much mindshare, but is an example of fracturing. Leverage is actually one of the most Archipelag-y subcommunities that exists already. Most people think it’s a bad idea, so they went off on their own and did their own thing. And now AFAICT they don’t interact with anyone else much. [Edit: previously ended paragraph with “System working as intended”]
[1] Obviously they have non-zero mindshare and some financial resources, and one can argue over whether non-zero is too much. (I personally think Leverage is more valuable than most people think it is, but I am not currently interested in defending that claim and don’t expect others to take my word on it)
Strong disagreement that this is how we want things to go. Leverage is a black hole. It’s like Wonka’s chocolate factory without the delicious chocolate. Nobody ever goes in except to join! And nobody ever comes out! Occasionally I interact with Nevin, and they do some recruiting and fundraising, but lots of cool people and friends of mine and ours vanished without a trace. And That’s Terrible.
One can disagree about the value of Leverage. Maybe they’re doing good work. Maybe they’re not. I mean, they never talk to us, so how could we possibly tell? But if the proposal is for various groups of us to go off in their corners and never talk to the other groups again, I think that part is really bad.
I am pessimistic about this. Not just because of the potential for Successful Bad Ideas; that’s already happened within the rationalist community without an explicit decision to archipelagize (uncontroversially, Leverage, and, more controversially, postrationalism). But also because a fractured community is vulnerable, and I expect this to cause or accelerate fracture. We’re already using different norms in different places; Tumblr/Twitter/LessWrong 1.0/Facebook, Bay vs. non-Bay, Berkeley vs. SF vs. South Bay. I don’t think this needs more pushes to diverge.
In fact, to the extent I’m working on community issues it’s trying to find means of strengthening ties. My pro-epistemic holiday creation project is trying to find things to reinforce the shared features without tying us to any subculture. I think this is more needed at the present moment.
I agree that fracturing is a risk (that should have made my earlier list), and I think it’s a fair question to ask “how do you expect Archipelago to handle that risk?”. (I do have some answers to that)
My counter question is “if you’re not doing something Archipelago-like, how do you handle genuine conflict over what norms should exist?” (the same question I’d ask any group that’s attempting to resolve things via vague consensus)
I also argue:
Archipelago is happening by default anyway, only badly/haphazardly
People want different things. People are naturally isolated due to accident of geography and “which parts of the internet feel most comfortable?” and “people cluster in small groups for social reasons” and “people tend to like interacting with particular types of people.”
I think if you are dissatisfied with that, you need to take particular countermeaures. Those countermeasures depend on which sub-problem you’re solving, and I think those countermeasures are largely orthogonal to Doing Archipelago On Purpose.
People who want popular things can get their thing represented at larger spaces. People who want unpopular things are screwed, and may ultimately decide to leave.
The reason I’m motivated to do this is the first place is that putting continuous effort into things is unpopular, and this applies to things ostensibly part of The Rationalist Shtick. (It’s not unpopular in a “people feel it’s unpopular” sense, just a “hard things are hard, therefore most people don’t do them sense”)
(Note that you can find people who put continuous effort into things and hang out with them, but the gatekeeping is entirely via vague-social-networking. One goal of On-Purpose-Archipelago is to make it easier for public facing groups to have standards.)
Metaphorical UniGov?
A section I probably should have included in the original essay is “what role does centralization play here?” In geopolitical Archipelago, Scott suggests a “UniGov” that everyone pays taxes to, whose job is to punish defectors, to provide education about different islands, and to be an inoffensive place for people to live if they have nowhere else to go.
Do we need a version of that? I think yes, but the implementation details might be different enough that it’s probably better not to try and force the metaphor to work.
I think there should be period large, public facing events, intended as a place for people from different subcultures to mingle and either generically bond (Solstice type things), or present their best ideas (Unconferences, CFAR Reunion [expensive but public facing]).
(I don’t currently believe smaller events can serve this purpose. A specific small event might bridge between two small groups in a specific fashion, but not act as a general-purpose-improve-connection-across-the-subsubcultures. I suppose lots of smaller events can do this collectively, although I would bet against this as a working systematic solution)
[Aside—Epistemic Habit, notice opportunity to operationalize prediction]
I want to say something in favor of haphazard archipelagos!
I think that it can often be a case of James Scott-ian local knowledge. Certain norms may naturally evolve because they are suited to the people who evolve them, in a way it’s hard to imitate through conscious norm design (because you can’t predict people’s needs, or you can’t come up with as clever solutions as the hivemind can, or whatever). In general, people can do a lot of really clever social cognition subconsciously that is really hard to explain consciously (this is why social skills classes are so bad).
To be clear, I am absolutely behind deliberate subculture design (with reasonable safeguards to avoid institutionally abusive communities); I am pretty much always in favor of more experimentation and more empiricism. But I also think that “haphazard archipelago” is not the same as “bad archipelago”.
Definitely agreed with that.
I think the existing system is basically an ad-hoc filtering system that meets the social goals of many othe people already in it. I’m not sure whether it works for finding people who are competent when you need competent people. (It might be doing a reasonable job of filtering for some combo of “competentish and a person you want to hang out with”)
Three problems that seem like they need solving are:
1) It’s hard for newcomers (or even, “moderately-old-timers” to network their way into the existing social groups). This sucks for them.
2) I seem to run into people who do end up in one sub-community but don’t really know which the other ones are or how to find them.
3) The aforementioned “none of the subcultures actually do quite the thing I want”.
4) I worry that the system filters more for “people’s ability to proactively navigate social clusters” then it filters for any other particular kind of competence.
I consider that there is a proof of concept of small events, regularly done and shared, providing enough common connection that there is centralization: American civic religion. Thanksgiving is a small event (usually) with a lot of variation and a few core components. People do all kinds of things on the 4th of July, but there will be some fireworks in there and some red white and blue. The Super Bowl is one our tribe generally opts out of, but it’s widely shared and also mostly small events.
None of that provides connection as strong as an Amish or Orthodox Jewish community, but it’s competitive with Twice-A-Year Catholics/Jews who show up just for the big ceremonies.
If regular small events provide cultural touchstones that any two small groups can bridge to each other, that’s useful as glue for conversation and cross-fertilization, which I think is more important. And they’re less epistemically dangerous than a clapping-along groupthink ceremony like Solstice.
Hmm. So, I certainly support more small events like you describe, but I’m not sure I grok what your goal with them is.
“American Civic Religion is competitive with twice-a-year Catholics” sounds true, but Broader-Rationality-Culture already seems at-least-as-good as both of those.
i.e, with Modern American Christmas, there’s a range of activities ranging from “singing songs drunkenly” to “quiet Midnight Mass” to “just visiting your relatives for dinner” to “watching the Rockettes at Rockerfeller center”.
LessWrong-descended-culture already seems to essentially be the sort of “twice a year Catholics/Jews” esque culture, with religish-holiday-esque-Winter-Solstice, general-festival-esque Summer Solstice, and CFAR Alumni Reunion and EA Global as non-religion-flavored things.
My impression is that your concern is more like “not liking that approach to establishing broader connection”.
My point is that clearly, small events are effective at sustaining ties, and so we should have some. I also am very suspicious of some common elements like singing in unison. They’re common enough to be perceived as secular, and so not given the same skepticism as explicit trappings of religion. I think this is a mistake. They have a literally hypnotic effect such that they tend to override standard skeptical filters, and I don’t see them as any less dangerous to epistemics when they are used to promote a fairly-good ideology.
My concern is that. used uncarefully, complex ceremonies and ritual creates belief system lock-in. The more you include, the more content you are embedding that is bypassing evidence-based reasoning and getting treated as true until the audience thinks to question it. Knowing that even the best belief system assuredly has flaws, I think it is wrong to do this any more than absolutely necessary.
So, there’s obviously a bunch of disagreements I have there, but they don’t feel like they’re touching on any of my cruxes. (I listed four major events, only one of which was especially ritualized. I feel like my arguments stay mostly the same in a parallel world where Solstice doesn’t exist)
I do agree that there should be more small events of the sort you describe. I’m not as excited about them as you because I think it’s a lot harder to get lots of people to do a distributed small event than a big event.
I also just don’t feel a need for that many repeated events, large or small, and I feel close-to-saturated on them. (to add an additional repeated event, I’d either need to sacrifice a currently-in-rotation repeat event, or sacrifice the ability to try new things)
I wonder whether creating and splitting off the subgroups could actually be a mechanism to preserve the large community. Some people seem to come to LW meetups for wrong reasons; for example they prefer clever arguing and ignore the science; it would be nice to have them form the separate “clever arguers club” and leave. If people sort themselves out, everyone is saved the unpleasantness of having to kick out people who clearly don’t belong and disrupt the goals of the group. (“Let the heretics leave peacefully.”)
But of course this has the risk that the disruptive people would prefer to stay in the majority group (e.g. a disruptive clever arguer may dislike the presence of other clever arguers); or simply have enough time to participate in all subgroups.
Re: Leverage
I actually think Leverage is not an instance of a bad idea getting too[1] much mindshare, but is an example of fracturing. Leverage is actually one of the most Archipelag-y subcommunities that exists already. Most people think it’s a bad idea, so they went off on their own and did their own thing. And now AFAICT they don’t interact with anyone else much. [Edit: previously ended paragraph with “System working as intended”]
[1] Obviously they have non-zero mindshare and some financial resources, and one can argue over whether non-zero is too much. (I personally think Leverage is more valuable than most people think it is, but I am not currently interested in defending that claim and don’t expect others to take my word on it)
Strong disagreement that this is how we want things to go. Leverage is a black hole. It’s like Wonka’s chocolate factory without the delicious chocolate. Nobody ever goes in except to join! And nobody ever comes out! Occasionally I interact with Nevin, and they do some recruiting and fundraising, but lots of cool people and friends of mine and ours vanished without a trace. And That’s Terrible.
One can disagree about the value of Leverage. Maybe they’re doing good work. Maybe they’re not. I mean, they never talk to us, so how could we possibly tell? But if the proposal is for various groups of us to go off in their corners and never talk to the other groups again, I think that part is really bad.
Ah, I worded something weirdly there and then said a thing I didn’t mean to say.
“System working as intended” originally came after an extended anecdote about them making a bid more public respect/status, and then failing.
I meant the comment to be saying “Leverage isn’t an example of the Bad Idea Gains traction problem, but is an example of the Splintering Problem.”