I think meeting once-a-week is just actually pretty hard to either enforce, or to provide enough value that people do voluntarily.
Some reasons to enforce and value it:
Value: Isn’t social belonging just mysteriously powerful factor in human health? There’s lots of studies on this. I get the impression it’s like exercise. It might not always feel good during the moment, but it pays off if you do it regularly.
Reasons to enforce regular attendance:
If you instead drift off into invite-only spaces, things immediately get way too selective, a bunch of people who never really did anything wrong fall through the cracks and get terminally lonely. We’re all altruistic enough that we don’t want that to happen, but it’s wrong to ask the most tolerant of us to be the ones to carry the entire burden, so we have to make sure the burden of dense connectivity is shared.
Spreading the truth and addressing misinformation may feel rewarding in a lot of situations, but in other important situations it isn’t rewarding, it’s punishing, and it actually isn’t done enough. There are a lot of important contrarian truths that people lose social standing for defending, there’s a responsibility to hold together and defend its defenders. We have to actively support that kind of contribution. We need to make it clear that maintaining collective epistemic health is a responsibility, not just a pastime, it’s not enough to do it just when it’s fun, we need to do it even when it requires real work that has real personal social burdens. If you want to benefit from the fruits of intellectual work, you should to turn up and socially support/be the people who do it.
This may sound like a daunting challenge to attracting people to the community, but everyone has a contrarian inside them that fears for its life and is searching for social safety, and only this kind of community that can credibly offer it!
it isn’t clear how you could enforce attendance or
what value individual attendees could have to make it worth their while to attend regularly.
(2) is sort of a collective action/game theoretic/coordination problem.
(1) reflects the rationalist nature of the organization.
Traditional religions back up attendance by divine command. They teach absolutist, divine command theoretic accounts of morality, backed up by accounts of commands from God to attend regularly. At the most severe mode these are backed by threat of eternal hellfire for disobedience. But it doesn’t usually come to that. The moralization of the attendance norm is strong enough to justify moderate amounts of social pressure to conform to it. Often that’s enough.
In a rationalist congregation, if you want a regular attendance norm, you have to ground it in a rational understanding that adhering to the norm makes the organization work. I think that might work, but it’s probably a lot harder because it requires a lot more cognitive steps to get to and it only works so long as attendees buy into the goal of contributing to the project for its own sake.
Some reasons to enforce and value it:
Value: Isn’t social belonging just mysteriously powerful factor in human health? There’s lots of studies on this. I get the impression it’s like exercise. It might not always feel good during the moment, but it pays off if you do it regularly.
Reasons to enforce regular attendance:
If you instead drift off into invite-only spaces, things immediately get way too selective, a bunch of people who never really did anything wrong fall through the cracks and get terminally lonely. We’re all altruistic enough that we don’t want that to happen, but it’s wrong to ask the most tolerant of us to be the ones to carry the entire burden, so we have to make sure the burden of dense connectivity is shared.
Spreading the truth and addressing misinformation may feel rewarding in a lot of situations, but in other important situations it isn’t rewarding, it’s punishing, and it actually isn’t done enough. There are a lot of important contrarian truths that people lose social standing for defending, there’s a responsibility to hold together and defend its defenders. We have to actively support that kind of contribution. We need to make it clear that maintaining collective epistemic health is a responsibility, not just a pastime, it’s not enough to do it just when it’s fun, we need to do it even when it requires real work that has real personal social burdens. If you want to benefit from the fruits of intellectual work, you should to turn up and socially support/be the people who do it.
This may sound like a daunting challenge to attracting people to the community, but everyone has a contrarian inside them that fears for its life and is searching for social safety, and only this kind of community that can credibly offer it!
For me the issue is that
it isn’t clear how you could enforce attendance or
what value individual attendees could have to make it worth their while to attend regularly.
(2) is sort of a collective action/game theoretic/coordination problem.
(1) reflects the rationalist nature of the organization.
Traditional religions back up attendance by divine command. They teach absolutist, divine command theoretic accounts of morality, backed up by accounts of commands from God to attend regularly. At the most severe mode these are backed by threat of eternal hellfire for disobedience. But it doesn’t usually come to that. The moralization of the attendance norm is strong enough to justify moderate amounts of social pressure to conform to it. Often that’s enough.
In a rationalist congregation, if you want a regular attendance norm, you have to ground it in a rational understanding that adhering to the norm makes the organization work. I think that might work, but it’s probably a lot harder because it requires a lot more cognitive steps to get to and it only works so long as attendees buy into the goal of contributing to the project for its own sake.