These are good insights on how communities function… but I’m a bit lost.
What is the purpose of a “rationalist community?”
I’m a bit new here, and often the essays seem to rest upon some prior understanding that I do not have. For this particular article, there seems to be some previous discussion about rationalist communities and why they are desirable… but I don’t see it in the linked articles or on the main page.
So can you tell me why I would want to participate in a “rationalist parenting club” rather than a regular one. Why not engage with mainstream institutions and try to make them as pro-reason as possible?
Whether building a rational community is a good idea depends a lot on what you want to get out of this website and rationality in general. If you want interesting discussions with interesting people, the skewed demographics of LessWrong hardly matter, and you probably won;t care too much about building a community.
But there are a lot of benefits to a society as a whole from having a more rational outlook, and that means spreading the memes of LessWrong beyond the audience that would stumble on them naturally. I would want to participate in a rationalist parenting club (if I had kids, which I don’t) to interact in real life with other people who share my interests and values, who won’t tell my kid they’re going to hell for not believing in Jesus, who encourage curiosity and experimentation and real understanding over faith.
As for trying to engage with mainstream institutions, of course we should! I haven’t seen anyone suggest we should disengage from the rest of the world. But making mainstream institutions pro-reason isn’t more difficult than it sounds, and will get easier if we have a larger community behind the effort.
These are good insights on how communities function… but I’m a bit lost.
What is the purpose of a “rationalist community?”
I’m a bit new here, and often the essays seem to rest upon some prior understanding that I do not have. For this particular article, there seems to be some previous discussion about rationalist communities and why they are desirable… but I don’t see it in the linked articles or on the main page.
So can you tell me why I would want to participate in a “rationalist parenting club” rather than a regular one. Why not engage with mainstream institutions and try to make them as pro-reason as possible?
Back in 2009, Eliezer Yudkowsky wrote about a dream of rationality dojos devoted to perfecting the art of human rationality.
In 2010, the Less Wrong meetups in New York became a tight-knit community — not quite a rationality dojo, but a human community with rational group norms. For many, the New York group is the exemplar of the future of the modern rationality movement.
Now Less Wrong meetup groups are popping up all over the place.
Check out the sequence “The Craft and The Community”.
Whether building a rational community is a good idea depends a lot on what you want to get out of this website and rationality in general. If you want interesting discussions with interesting people, the skewed demographics of LessWrong hardly matter, and you probably won;t care too much about building a community.
But there are a lot of benefits to a society as a whole from having a more rational outlook, and that means spreading the memes of LessWrong beyond the audience that would stumble on them naturally. I would want to participate in a rationalist parenting club (if I had kids, which I don’t) to interact in real life with other people who share my interests and values, who won’t tell my kid they’re going to hell for not believing in Jesus, who encourage curiosity and experimentation and real understanding over faith.
As for trying to engage with mainstream institutions, of course we should! I haven’t seen anyone suggest we should disengage from the rest of the world. But making mainstream institutions pro-reason isn’t more difficult than it sounds, and will get easier if we have a larger community behind the effort.