I understand that you’re trying to build a community… I just have no idea why.
Because being part of a community is something that, for most people, is just innately nice...and being in a community of people with particular values and habits makes most people better at living up to those values and building those habits.
One of the nice things about a community is being able to talk to a bunch of people who, although you may not know them personally, are not far from you in inferential distance and share much of the same jargon/vocabulary. Less Wrong has a very particular jargon, which isn’t shared by other “skeptics” meetups, and the focus of discussion is slightly different: thinking accurately, making good decisions, and achieving goals, along with a bunch of Singularity memes...there is some overlap with other skeptics’ meetups, but not totally.
There are already a ton of communities organized around religion, and it’s been tempting for me in the past to go to church just because it provided a ready-made community of nice people who were already in the habit of being helpful to each other, singing together, etc. I don’t know if the instinct to latch onto a community is stronger or weaker in myself than in the average LWer, but it would certainly be nice to have a possible community of people who actually shared my beliefs.
Because being part of a community is something that, for most people, is just innately nice...and being in a community of people with particular values and habits makes most people better at living up to those values and building those habits.
One of the nice things about a community is being able to talk to a bunch of people who, although you may not know them personally, are not far from you in inferential distance and share much of the same jargon/vocabulary. Less Wrong has a very particular jargon, which isn’t shared by other “skeptics” meetups, and the focus of discussion is slightly different: thinking accurately, making good decisions, and achieving goals, along with a bunch of Singularity memes...there is some overlap with other skeptics’ meetups, but not totally.
There are already a ton of communities organized around religion, and it’s been tempting for me in the past to go to church just because it provided a ready-made community of nice people who were already in the habit of being helpful to each other, singing together, etc. I don’t know if the instinct to latch onto a community is stronger or weaker in myself than in the average LWer, but it would certainly be nice to have a possible community of people who actually shared my beliefs.