the most straightforward explanation for this is “different things work for different people, but it’s basically impossible to predict or control this” plus self-selection plus survivorship bias.
This contains three claims.
Different self-improvement strategies work for different people
It’s infeasible to predict which strategy will work
Cases of transformative rationality are selection and survivor bias
#1 is something we’ve talked about internally and it seems mostly true to me. The fractal nature of the existing self-help landscape definitely support this, and it’s common to hear things like “I tried a bunch of things, none of them worked until I did X”. And then X is always different.
#2 might be true? I agree that predicting it through S2 is unlikely to work, but I think approximating a solution with S1 isn’t impossible. On the other hand, the kinds of problems S1 tends to be good at involve short feedback loops, and self-improvement very much doesn’t. So this may ultimately prove to be intractable --
-- but I don’t think that’s a dealbreaker. We don’t need to know exactly which solution will solve a person’s problem. It would be valuable just to have a list of the top N most common solutions, and then be able to tell people “yeah we don’t know which one will work but there’s an 80% chance one of them will, so just start at the top and work your way down”. As a Council, we’ve talked a lot about the broad categories most people’s problems fall into (we came up with social, learning, motivation, and resources) and we’ve been targeting most of our courses to teach skills in those areas. But that’s getting into the weeds.
#3 seems straightforwardly true. But… I’m not sure that matters? Sure, you hear about the successes and not the failures, but the point is that success is possible. That selection and survivor biases play a role just means that we can’t tell people to read the sequences and expect that to be a panacea. And that’s not surprising! I bounced off the sequences a couple times before they got hold of me. Rationality’s marketing is awful, and the sequences themselves have a lot of issues.
Can you say more about [Guild-as-community]?
About a year ago, someone posted a link to the beta invitation in a rationalist discord I hang out in (the Bayesian Conspiracy). I clicked the link and thought the courses were interesting, and I figured I could give them a try, take what was useful, discard the rest, and move on once I got bored. In Sabien’s terms, I was playing the Black Knight.
The Black Knight is a mercenary; it has goals of its own, and it’s only allied with you because your goals align with them. This does not mean that the Black Knight is dishonorable; the Black Knight is perfectly aware of the instrumental value of its reputation, and of the power of mutually beneficial coordination, and it is every bit as honest as the White or Red Knights.
Shortly after joining, the Council put out a call for graphic designers and website developers. I ended up designing the second iteration of their logo and building the site. Again, that was because it benefited me—taking on those projects gave me much-needed practice, and it was an opportunity to make a bit of money while boosting my ingroup status. Alex ultimately offered me a seat on the Council as a result of my work, but I declined because I didn’t want the responsibility that came with it.
It wasn’t until the courses started and I met my cohort that my mindset started changing. I love all my cohort mates but especially meeting Octavia (@Slimepriestess/Hivewired) did a lot to make me see how valuable the Guild could be as a community. A few months later, I was thinking about getting back into World of Warcraft and I… kind of realized that the reason I wanted to play MMORPGs again was loneliness. With ~two years of rationality under my belt, ignoring the community-shaped hole in my heart wasn’t an option anymore. And I also realized that either I was going to fill it with a gaming guild, or I was going to fill it with the Guild.
So I decided to go all-in and stop holding back. I asked Alex if he still wanted me on the Council, he said yes, and here we are a couple months later. I’ve put a lot into the Guild at this point and I don’t regret it. There’s a part of me that really wants to take care of a community. Not like, acquire followers or “friends” or whatever, but to build a flourishing, healthy social web. And I’d also like to make it less insular, less walled-off, less fractured, more accessible. There’s a divide in the greater community between rationalists and postrationalists and I think that’s really sad and disappointing.
I don’t know if ROSE can heal that rift and bring rationality to the masses, but… I’m not here for the grand Purpose. I’m here because I like what the Guild is doing right now and because I’m better off with it in my life than without. I’m here for every step of the journey.
can you say how this interacts with the remote nature of your association?
Being remote has a number of advantages:
Accessibility. Rationalists are widely dispersed, and by not being tied to a single city, it’s much easier for new people to join
Better dynamics. Most cults form in real life because when you’re irl, an organization can exert a LOT of pressure on you simply by taking over your physical space. As an online org, we don’t have to worry about that, at least not as much.
Of course, “better dynamics” is only one frame. What’s really going on here is that we have less power over our members, which means that, yes, we can’t do toxic cult stuff, but it also means we can’t push people as hard as they might want. Tradeoffs.
Smoother on-ramp. Joining an in-person community can be really intimidating. It’s a lot easier to pitch “hey, join our discord server” than it is to pitch “come to our meetup”.
Especially if you’ve heard of “rationalist meetups” and have a bunch of negative associations
The big disadvantage everyone thinks of is something along the lines of “yeah but online relationships aren’t real”, which… can be true, but isn’t if you do them right. At least for me, it’s a lot easier for me to be genuine and honest in textual interactions. Moreover, online-only seems to be working fine for us. A few months ago we had an informal retrospective survey for our users and something that came up repeatedly was that people really liked their cohorts.
Being remote also makes it a lot easier to interact with the Guild. Anyone can ping a Councilor and ask them questions directly. Anyone can, at any time, post someone in a cohort chat without having to wait for the next meetup. Since Discord is the communication medium instead of a supplement, it’s much more likely that people will be active and respond.
I don’t have hard research on this, but my gut feeling from what I’ve read over the past few years is that full irl or full remote are both viable, but hybrid or transitional periods tend to have a lot of problems because the two paradigms are poorly integrated.
But ultimately, we don’t have a choice. If the Guild had to be in-person, it’d never have gotten started (not enough people). Moreover, we still don’t have enough people to sustain even an informal meetup, let alone structured courses.
#3 seems straightforwardly true. But… I’m not sure that matters? Sure, you hear about the successes and not the failures, but the point is that success is possible. That selection and survivor biases play a role just means that we can’t tell people to read the sequences and expect that to be a panacea.
Well, if this is true, it also means that you’re unlikely to reliably succeed at deliberately making success happen (that is, you’re almost certain to succeed in some small fraction of cases, and just as certain to fail in the greater part). Of course, such things can be true to a greater or lesser degree, and I don’t want to push this point too hard.
Re: the Guild as community:
What do you think of the notion (which has been brought up by me, and others, at various times in the past) that a significant cause of many of the problems that plague the Bay Area rationalist communities is precisely the conflation of the community and the task/project group? Do you think this view is basically wrong, or that it’s basically correct but it won’t be a problem for you (for whatever reason), or something else?
What do you think of the notion that a significant cause of many of the problems that plague the Bay Area rationalist communities is precisely the conflation of the community and the task/project group?
It seems plausible, but mostly I think I’m unqualified to have an opinion since I’ve neither researched nor interacted with that community. However… I’m very skeptical that craft/community mixing is inherently bad. Could you elaborate more on why you think this is the case for the Bay Area, or link me to something that explains the reasoning a bit more?
This contains three claims.
Different self-improvement strategies work for different people
It’s infeasible to predict which strategy will work
Cases of transformative rationality are selection and survivor bias
#1 is something we’ve talked about internally and it seems mostly true to me. The fractal nature of the existing self-help landscape definitely support this, and it’s common to hear things like “I tried a bunch of things, none of them worked until I did X”. And then X is always different.
#2 might be true? I agree that predicting it through S2 is unlikely to work, but I think approximating a solution with S1 isn’t impossible. On the other hand, the kinds of problems S1 tends to be good at involve short feedback loops, and self-improvement very much doesn’t. So this may ultimately prove to be intractable --
-- but I don’t think that’s a dealbreaker. We don’t need to know exactly which solution will solve a person’s problem. It would be valuable just to have a list of the top N most common solutions, and then be able to tell people “yeah we don’t know which one will work but there’s an 80% chance one of them will, so just start at the top and work your way down”. As a Council, we’ve talked a lot about the broad categories most people’s problems fall into (we came up with social, learning, motivation, and resources) and we’ve been targeting most of our courses to teach skills in those areas. But that’s getting into the weeds.
#3 seems straightforwardly true. But… I’m not sure that matters? Sure, you hear about the successes and not the failures, but the point is that success is possible. That selection and survivor biases play a role just means that we can’t tell people to read the sequences and expect that to be a panacea. And that’s not surprising! I bounced off the sequences a couple times before they got hold of me. Rationality’s marketing is awful, and the sequences themselves have a lot of issues.
About a year ago, someone posted a link to the beta invitation in a rationalist discord I hang out in (the Bayesian Conspiracy). I clicked the link and thought the courses were interesting, and I figured I could give them a try, take what was useful, discard the rest, and move on once I got bored. In Sabien’s terms, I was playing the Black Knight.
Shortly after joining, the Council put out a call for graphic designers and website developers. I ended up designing the second iteration of their logo and building the site. Again, that was because it benefited me—taking on those projects gave me much-needed practice, and it was an opportunity to make a bit of money while boosting my ingroup status. Alex ultimately offered me a seat on the Council as a result of my work, but I declined because I didn’t want the responsibility that came with it.
It wasn’t until the courses started and I met my cohort that my mindset started changing. I love all my cohort mates but especially meeting Octavia (@Slimepriestess/Hivewired) did a lot to make me see how valuable the Guild could be as a community. A few months later, I was thinking about getting back into World of Warcraft and I… kind of realized that the reason I wanted to play MMORPGs again was loneliness. With ~two years of rationality under my belt, ignoring the community-shaped hole in my heart wasn’t an option anymore. And I also realized that either I was going to fill it with a gaming guild, or I was going to fill it with the Guild.
So I decided to go all-in and stop holding back. I asked Alex if he still wanted me on the Council, he said yes, and here we are a couple months later. I’ve put a lot into the Guild at this point and I don’t regret it. There’s a part of me that really wants to take care of a community. Not like, acquire followers or “friends” or whatever, but to build a flourishing, healthy social web. And I’d also like to make it less insular, less walled-off, less fractured, more accessible. There’s a divide in the greater community between rationalists and postrationalists and I think that’s really sad and disappointing.
I don’t know if ROSE can heal that rift and bring rationality to the masses, but… I’m not here for the grand Purpose. I’m here because I like what the Guild is doing right now and because I’m better off with it in my life than without. I’m here for every step of the journey.
Being remote has a number of advantages:
Accessibility. Rationalists are widely dispersed, and by not being tied to a single city, it’s much easier for new people to join
Better dynamics. Most cults form in real life because when you’re irl, an organization can exert a LOT of pressure on you simply by taking over your physical space. As an online org, we don’t have to worry about that, at least not as much.
Of course, “better dynamics” is only one frame. What’s really going on here is that we have less power over our members, which means that, yes, we can’t do toxic cult stuff, but it also means we can’t push people as hard as they might want. Tradeoffs.
Smoother on-ramp. Joining an in-person community can be really intimidating. It’s a lot easier to pitch “hey, join our discord server” than it is to pitch “come to our meetup”.
Especially if you’ve heard of “rationalist meetups” and have a bunch of negative associations
The big disadvantage everyone thinks of is something along the lines of “yeah but online relationships aren’t real”, which… can be true, but isn’t if you do them right. At least for me, it’s a lot easier for me to be genuine and honest in textual interactions. Moreover, online-only seems to be working fine for us. A few months ago we had an informal retrospective survey for our users and something that came up repeatedly was that people really liked their cohorts.
Being remote also makes it a lot easier to interact with the Guild. Anyone can ping a Councilor and ask them questions directly. Anyone can, at any time, post someone in a cohort chat without having to wait for the next meetup. Since Discord is the communication medium instead of a supplement, it’s much more likely that people will be active and respond.
I don’t have hard research on this, but my gut feeling from what I’ve read over the past few years is that full irl or full remote are both viable, but hybrid or transitional periods tend to have a lot of problems because the two paradigms are poorly integrated.
But ultimately, we don’t have a choice. If the Guild had to be in-person, it’d never have gotten started (not enough people). Moreover, we still don’t have enough people to sustain even an informal meetup, let alone structured courses.
Well, if this is true, it also means that you’re unlikely to reliably succeed at deliberately making success happen (that is, you’re almost certain to succeed in some small fraction of cases, and just as certain to fail in the greater part). Of course, such things can be true to a greater or lesser degree, and I don’t want to push this point too hard.
Re: the Guild as community:
What do you think of the notion (which has been brought up by me, and others, at various times in the past) that a significant cause of many of the problems that plague the Bay Area rationalist communities is precisely the conflation of the community and the task/project group? Do you think this view is basically wrong, or that it’s basically correct but it won’t be a problem for you (for whatever reason), or something else?
It seems plausible, but mostly I think I’m unqualified to have an opinion since I’ve neither researched nor interacted with that community. However… I’m very skeptical that craft/community mixing is inherently bad. Could you elaborate more on why you think this is the case for the Bay Area, or link me to something that explains the reasoning a bit more?
Hmm, I’d have to dig up links, which I don’t have handy; I was hoping you’d already be familiar with this debate. Ah well.
I guess I’ll just say that past experience and observation leads me to be very skeptical of your “mixed approach”, so to speak.