The maintenance of already existing cultural traits that are off-putting to outsiders may be more effective than intentionally designing filters, because the former are already part of the community, so by keeping them we’re not diluting the culture, and the process of designing filters is likely to cause contestation within the community.about which of its traits are essential and which are peripheral.
It’s hard to explicitly describe what the current barriers to entry are, but they include familiarity with LW ideas (and agreement with a lot of them), enjoying the analytical style of discussion and thought, etc. I occasionally see someone come across rationalistsphere and respond with something like “Ugh, a community of robots/autists started by essays written for aliens”—I want to keep whatever it is that repulses them.
1) a really valuable thing the community provides is a place to talk about ideas at a deep level. This is pretty rare, and it’s valuable both to the sort of people who explicitly crave that, and (I believe), valuable to the world for generating ideas that are really important, and I do this this is something that is at risk of being destroyed if we lowered barriers to entry and scaled up without thinking too hard about it.
but, 2) it’s also the case that
2a) there are a lot of smart people who I know would contribute valuable things to the community, but feel offput by things that are not necessary to have the kind of valuable conversations this community is good at
2b) a thriving community really needs things beyond being-good-at-thinking. Especially a community whose thinking has always been tied to “actually doing.” An environment where only being clever is rewarded, will neither be able to provide for people’s emotional needs sufficiently, nor actually achieve any of its broader goals.
I have thoughts on how to resolve this, but I’m trying to stick to the “talk about the problem” part, rather than the “propose solutions” part. For now, I’ll note that I do not expect a single monolithic shift in the community, but I hope for better coordination between different sub-communities.
2a here seems like a major issue to me. I’ve had an essay brewing for a couple of months, about how the range of behaviors we tolerate affects who is willing to join the community. It’s much easier to see the people who join than the people who are pushed away.
I argue that the way we are currently inclusive goes beyond being a safe space for weirdness, and extends into being anti-normal in a way that frightens off anyone who already has strong mainstream social skills. And that we can and should encourage social skill development while remaining a safe space.
If there’s interest, I’ll finish writing the longer-form argument.
Sure. The biggest one is that when someone has poor social skills, we treat that as a thing to tolerate rather than as a thing to fix. E.g. someone shows up to a meetup and doesn’t really get how conversation flow works, when it’s time to talk and when it’s time to listen, how to tell the difference between someone being interested in what ze has to say and someone just being polite. We’re welcoming, at least outwardly, and encourage that person to keep showing up, so ze does. And the people who are both disinclined to be ranted to and who have the social skills to avoid the person learn to do so, but we don’t seem to make any effort to help the person become less annoying. So ze continues to inflict zirself on newcomers who haven’t learned better, and they walk away with the impression that that’s what our community is.
Which is sad, because we spend plenty of time encouraging self-improvement in thinking skills. If we siphoned some effort from “notice you’re confused” to “notice your audience”, we should be able to encourage self-improvement in social skills as well. But since we don’t treat it like something fixable, it doesn’t get fixed.
The maintenance of already existing cultural traits that are off-putting to outsiders may be more effective than intentionally designing filters, because the former are already part of the community, so by keeping them we’re not diluting the culture, and the process of designing filters is likely to cause contestation within the community.about which of its traits are essential and which are peripheral.
It’s hard to explicitly describe what the current barriers to entry are, but they include familiarity with LW ideas (and agreement with a lot of them), enjoying the analytical style of discussion and thought, etc. I occasionally see someone come across rationalistsphere and respond with something like “Ugh, a community of robots/autists started by essays written for aliens”—I want to keep whatever it is that repulses them.
I think it is both the case that:
1) a really valuable thing the community provides is a place to talk about ideas at a deep level. This is pretty rare, and it’s valuable both to the sort of people who explicitly crave that, and (I believe), valuable to the world for generating ideas that are really important, and I do this this is something that is at risk of being destroyed if we lowered barriers to entry and scaled up without thinking too hard about it.
but, 2) it’s also the case that
2a) there are a lot of smart people who I know would contribute valuable things to the community, but feel offput by things that are not necessary to have the kind of valuable conversations this community is good at
2b) a thriving community really needs things beyond being-good-at-thinking. Especially a community whose thinking has always been tied to “actually doing.” An environment where only being clever is rewarded, will neither be able to provide for people’s emotional needs sufficiently, nor actually achieve any of its broader goals.
I have thoughts on how to resolve this, but I’m trying to stick to the “talk about the problem” part, rather than the “propose solutions” part. For now, I’ll note that I do not expect a single monolithic shift in the community, but I hope for better coordination between different sub-communities.
2a here seems like a major issue to me. I’ve had an essay brewing for a couple of months, about how the range of behaviors we tolerate affects who is willing to join the community. It’s much easier to see the people who join than the people who are pushed away.
I argue that the way we are currently inclusive goes beyond being a safe space for weirdness, and extends into being anti-normal in a way that frightens off anyone who already has strong mainstream social skills. And that we can and should encourage social skill development while remaining a safe space.
If there’s interest, I’ll finish writing the longer-form argument.
Any quick examples before the long-form essay?
Sure. The biggest one is that when someone has poor social skills, we treat that as a thing to tolerate rather than as a thing to fix. E.g. someone shows up to a meetup and doesn’t really get how conversation flow works, when it’s time to talk and when it’s time to listen, how to tell the difference between someone being interested in what ze has to say and someone just being polite. We’re welcoming, at least outwardly, and encourage that person to keep showing up, so ze does. And the people who are both disinclined to be ranted to and who have the social skills to avoid the person learn to do so, but we don’t seem to make any effort to help the person become less annoying. So ze continues to inflict zirself on newcomers who haven’t learned better, and they walk away with the impression that that’s what our community is.
Which is sad, because we spend plenty of time encouraging self-improvement in thinking skills. If we siphoned some effort from “notice you’re confused” to “notice your audience”, we should be able to encourage self-improvement in social skills as well. But since we don’t treat it like something fixable, it doesn’t get fixed.