if we’re trying to get the marginal person who isn’t quite a community member yet but occasionally reads Less Wrong to integrate more
I don’t know who “we” are, but my personal hope for the marginal person who isn’t quite a community member but occasionally reads this website isn’t that they necessarily integrate with the community, but that they benefit from understanding the ideas that we talk about on this website—the stuff about science and Bayesian reasoning, which, being universals, bear no distinguishing evidence of their origin. I wouldn’t want to privilege the hypothesis that integrating with the community is the right thing to do if you understand the material, given the size of the space of competing alternatives. (The rest of the world is a much larger place than “the community”; you need more evidence to justify the plan of reorganizing your life around a community qua community than you do to justify the plan of reading an interesting blog.)
Thanks for phrasing this as a conditional! To fill in another branch of the if/else-if/else-if … conditional statement: if the rationalist project is supposed to be about systematically correct reasoning—having the right ideas because they’re right, rather than spreading our ideas because they’re ours—then things that are advantageous to the movement could be disadvantageous to the ideology, if the needs of growing the coalition’s resources conflict with the needs of constructing shared maps that reflect the territory.
I don’t know who “we” are, but my personal hope for the marginal person who isn’t quite a community member but occasionally reads this website isn’t that they necessarily integrate with the community, but that they benefit from understanding the ideas that we talk about on this website—the stuff about science and Bayesian reasoning, which, being universals, bear no distinguishing evidence of their origin. I wouldn’t want to privilege the hypothesis that integrating with the community is the right thing to do if you understand the material, given the size of the space of competing alternatives. (The rest of the world is a much larger place than “the community”; you need more evidence to justify the plan of reorganizing your life around a community qua community than you do to justify the plan of reading an interesting blog.)
Living in a social bubble can easily be a negative for actual truth-seeking.