My hypothesis for the relation between self-improvement and woo is that people suck at holding two perspectives that seems to be pointing in the opposite direction, long enough to figure out a synthesis.
Let me give you an example: historically, people dreamed about flying. There are two simple ways how to respond to this desire:
giving up. Gravity is a law of nature. The birds have wings, the humans have not. End of conversation. Everyone who cannot suppress their desire to fly is an idiot, let’s laugh at them!
wishful thinking. I am sure that if I pray hard enough and purge my mind of negative thoughts, I will be able to spread my arms and fly. La-la-la, I can’t hear your skepticism!
The correct solution, as we know now, is to accept gravity as a fact, and then explore the other laws of nature until we find a force that can overcome gravity. There are even multiple solutions—balloons, gliding, reactive motors—but all of them require doing something complicated.
The difficulty is not that gravity is fundamentally incompatible with flying, but that both require contradictory emotions. You can feel the inescapable pressure of the universal law of gravity… or you can feel lightness and imagine flying… but it is difficult to feel both at the same time. Human thinking is just a thin layer on top of a fundamentally emotional machine, people usually get addicted to one emotion or the other, and then they become unable to consider the other part of the picture.
Similar pattern: effective altruism. People feel sad about bad things happening in the world and our inability to address them efficiently. The simple solutions:
grow up and accept the wisdom that the world cannot change. This can be simple fatalism, or a clever economical theory about how feeding the Africans only makes them reproduce more.
pray harder, post touching pictures on social networks, meditate and send positive energy.
A correct solution: collect data and calculate, promote the actions with the greatest impact.
The emotional problem: “observing the reality and calculating the hard data” and “desire to change reality” are emotionally incompatible. People choose one emotion or the other, and get stuck with it.
And the self-improvement seems to follow the similar dichotomy:
accept that you can’t improve (skills, looks, money, relationships), become proud of this “wisdom”, laugh at people who try to achieve something and call them immature, make sure to collect data about all their failings and never mention any success
read your horoscope, practice positive thinking, read alternative news sources, harmonize your chakras, read inspiring success stories, join a pyramid scheme, sell homeopathy, be open to everything (except for things that you develop aversion to, such as computers or vaccines)
Again, competing emotions of “noticing that the world sucks” and “the feeling that more is possible”. Can you keep trying, when you know that the motivational literature is scam, the success stories are mostly lies, many scientific findings don’t replicate, and your own results are probably just placebo?
.
About your list of options:
If you want to move somewhere, it would be nice (if you have enough time and money) to check the rationalist communities outside the Bay Area, because that place just seems doomed—the social pressure to take drugs and meditate will be too strong, and even if you personally resist it, the vortex will keep pulling away parts of your social circle.
Maybe Scott Alexander knows about this more: a few years ago, he traveled across the world, visiting various ACX meetups. He may at least narrow down the list of interesting places.
Recruiting new rationalists seemed to me like the best option, a few years ago. I mean, if I was impressed with the Sequences, surely there must be other people who will feel the same way, if only they get the text. Maybe I should go to a local math college and give away a few free copies of HP:MoR! These days, I don’t believe it anymore. The internet is a small place, and the rationalist community has a decent online presence. Most nerds have already heard about us. If they don’t join, it’s probably because they are not interested. There may be an exception or two, but probably not enough to start a local meetup.
If you start a community with non-rationalists, the chance to change it to a community of rationalists seems zero to me. (One possible exception: You could start a community that teaches self-help, or something like that, and then gradually find potential rationalists among the students.)
“Raising the sanity waterline” was the old plan, and some CFAR materials are freely available online. But you probably shouldn’t do it alone, as it is a lot of work.
I think you could achieve a better “tribe” feeling online with a smaller dedicated group, meeting regularly, having video calls, and a private channel for asynchronous communication. (Or maybe try The Guild of the Rose? I don’t know much about them, though.)
Regularly calling two or three people still sounds preferable to doing it alone. Maybe you could try to meet more people, and hope to find someone rationality-compatible.
My hypothesis for the relation between self-improvement and woo is that people suck at holding two perspectives that seems to be pointing in the opposite direction, long enough to figure out a synthesis.
Let me give you an example: historically, people dreamed about flying. There are two simple ways how to respond to this desire:
giving up. Gravity is a law of nature. The birds have wings, the humans have not. End of conversation. Everyone who cannot suppress their desire to fly is an idiot, let’s laugh at them!
wishful thinking. I am sure that if I pray hard enough and purge my mind of negative thoughts, I will be able to spread my arms and fly. La-la-la, I can’t hear your skepticism!
The correct solution, as we know now, is to accept gravity as a fact, and then explore the other laws of nature until we find a force that can overcome gravity. There are even multiple solutions—balloons, gliding, reactive motors—but all of them require doing something complicated.
The difficulty is not that gravity is fundamentally incompatible with flying, but that both require contradictory emotions. You can feel the inescapable pressure of the universal law of gravity… or you can feel lightness and imagine flying… but it is difficult to feel both at the same time. Human thinking is just a thin layer on top of a fundamentally emotional machine, people usually get addicted to one emotion or the other, and then they become unable to consider the other part of the picture.
Similar pattern: effective altruism. People feel sad about bad things happening in the world and our inability to address them efficiently. The simple solutions:
grow up and accept the wisdom that the world cannot change. This can be simple fatalism, or a clever economical theory about how feeding the Africans only makes them reproduce more.
pray harder, post touching pictures on social networks, meditate and send positive energy.
A correct solution: collect data and calculate, promote the actions with the greatest impact.
The emotional problem: “observing the reality and calculating the hard data” and “desire to change reality” are emotionally incompatible. People choose one emotion or the other, and get stuck with it.
And the self-improvement seems to follow the similar dichotomy:
accept that you can’t improve (skills, looks, money, relationships), become proud of this “wisdom”, laugh at people who try to achieve something and call them immature, make sure to collect data about all their failings and never mention any success
read your horoscope, practice positive thinking, read alternative news sources, harmonize your chakras, read inspiring success stories, join a pyramid scheme, sell homeopathy, be open to everything (except for things that you develop aversion to, such as computers or vaccines)
Again, competing emotions of “noticing that the world sucks” and “the feeling that more is possible”. Can you keep trying, when you know that the motivational literature is scam, the success stories are mostly lies, many scientific findings don’t replicate, and your own results are probably just placebo?
.
About your list of options:
If you want to move somewhere, it would be nice (if you have enough time and money) to check the rationalist communities outside the Bay Area, because that place just seems doomed—the social pressure to take drugs and meditate will be too strong, and even if you personally resist it, the vortex will keep pulling away parts of your social circle.
Maybe Scott Alexander knows about this more: a few years ago, he traveled across the world, visiting various ACX meetups. He may at least narrow down the list of interesting places.
Recruiting new rationalists seemed to me like the best option, a few years ago. I mean, if I was impressed with the Sequences, surely there must be other people who will feel the same way, if only they get the text. Maybe I should go to a local math college and give away a few free copies of HP:MoR! These days, I don’t believe it anymore. The internet is a small place, and the rationalist community has a decent online presence. Most nerds have already heard about us. If they don’t join, it’s probably because they are not interested. There may be an exception or two, but probably not enough to start a local meetup.
If you start a community with non-rationalists, the chance to change it to a community of rationalists seems zero to me. (One possible exception: You could start a community that teaches self-help, or something like that, and then gradually find potential rationalists among the students.)
“Raising the sanity waterline” was the old plan, and some CFAR materials are freely available online. But you probably shouldn’t do it alone, as it is a lot of work.
I think you could achieve a better “tribe” feeling online with a smaller dedicated group, meeting regularly, having video calls, and a private channel for asynchronous communication. (Or maybe try The Guild of the Rose? I don’t know much about them, though.)
Regularly calling two or three people still sounds preferable to doing it alone. Maybe you could try to meet more people, and hope to find someone rationality-compatible.