I think you are both right about important things, and the problem is whether we can design a community that can draw benefits of mutual support in real life, while minimising the risks. Keeping each other at internet distance is a solution, but I strongly believe it is far from the best we can do.
We probably need to accept that different people will have different preferences about how strongly involved they want to become in real life. For some people, internet debate may be the optimal level of involvement. For other people, it would be something more like the Dragon Army. Others will want something in between, and probably with emphasis on different things, e.g. more about projects and less about social interaction versus more about social interaction and less about projects. (Here, social interaction is my shortcut for solving everyday problems faced by individual people where they are now, as opposed to having a coherent outside-oriented project.)
But with different levels of involvement, there is a risk that people on some level would declare people on a different level to be “not true rationalists”. (Those with low involvement are not true rationalists, because they only want to procrastinate online, instead of becoming stronger and optimizing their lives. Those with high involvement are not true rationalists, because they care less about having correct knowledge, and more about belonging to a tribe and having group sex.) And if people around you prefer a different level, there will be social pressure to also choose a level that is not comfortable for you.
My vision would be a community where multiple levels of involvement are acceptable and all are considered normal. I believe it is possible in principle, because e.g. the Catholic Church is kinda like this: you have levels of involvement starting with “remembers a few memes, and visits the church on Christmas if the weather is nice” and ending with “spends the whole life isolated from the world, praying and debating esoteric topics”. Except for us it would go from “heard something about biases and how map is not the territory, and visits a LW/SSC meetup once in a while” to “lives in a group house and works full-time on preventing robot apocalypse”.
Plus, there are people for whom just having a group boundary as such, no matter how small, even something as vague as “identifies as a ‘rationalist’, whatever that word might mean”, is already too much. They can actually be a majority of LW readers, who knows; they are probably overrepresented among lurkers. But even for them, the website will continue existing approximately as they are now; and if some of them disappears, there are always other place on the internet.
tl;dr—we need to somehow have stronger rationalist groups for those who want them, without creating social pressure on those who don’t
I think you are both right about important things, and the problem is whether we can design a community that can draw benefits of mutual support in real life, while minimising the risks. Keeping each other at internet distance is a solution, but I strongly believe it is far from the best we can do.
We probably need to accept that different people will have different preferences about how strongly involved they want to become in real life. For some people, internet debate may be the optimal level of involvement. For other people, it would be something more like the Dragon Army. Others will want something in between, and probably with emphasis on different things, e.g. more about projects and less about social interaction versus more about social interaction and less about projects. (Here, social interaction is my shortcut for solving everyday problems faced by individual people where they are now, as opposed to having a coherent outside-oriented project.)
But with different levels of involvement, there is a risk that people on some level would declare people on a different level to be “not true rationalists”. (Those with low involvement are not true rationalists, because they only want to procrastinate online, instead of becoming stronger and optimizing their lives. Those with high involvement are not true rationalists, because they care less about having correct knowledge, and more about belonging to a tribe and having group sex.) And if people around you prefer a different level, there will be social pressure to also choose a level that is not comfortable for you.
My vision would be a community where multiple levels of involvement are acceptable and all are considered normal. I believe it is possible in principle, because e.g. the Catholic Church is kinda like this: you have levels of involvement starting with “remembers a few memes, and visits the church on Christmas if the weather is nice” and ending with “spends the whole life isolated from the world, praying and debating esoteric topics”. Except for us it would go from “heard something about biases and how map is not the territory, and visits a LW/SSC meetup once in a while” to “lives in a group house and works full-time on preventing robot apocalypse”.
Plus, there are people for whom just having a group boundary as such, no matter how small, even something as vague as “identifies as a ‘rationalist’, whatever that word might mean”, is already too much. They can actually be a majority of LW readers, who knows; they are probably overrepresented among lurkers. But even for them, the website will continue existing approximately as they are now; and if some of them disappears, there are always other place on the internet.
tl;dr—we need to somehow have stronger rationalist groups for those who want them, without creating social pressure on those who don’t