There’s a pretty straightforward mechanism by which this happens:
In order to make it possible for everyone (i.e., the spouse, the kids, the friends, etc.) to participate in your thing, you have to dilute your thing until it’s tolerable (never mind appealing, even; just tolerable!) to everyone.
No rationalist organization can have everyone participate and remain a rationalist organization, because rationality is not appealing, nor even tolerable, to everyone.
The path forward is either “exclude most people” or “abandon all that is ‘rationalist’ about your group and what it does”.
But also, my experience is this doesn’t work either (in particular if your goal is “people show up every week.” People showing up every week is a lot, and you need to be offering them something they can’t get anywhere else for that. The groups I’ve seen attempt to go this route didn’t work either because they were too generic to matter.
You don’t necessarily have to have every individual person showing up every week, though, just often enough that the thing happens in aggregate. Choir manages weekly during concert season and biweekly the rest of the time! D&D groups often manage weekly. It’s still hard but it’s not, like, completely obviously impossible like “every person shows up every week”.
There’s a pretty straightforward mechanism by which this happens:
In order to make it possible for everyone (i.e., the spouse, the kids, the friends, etc.) to participate in your thing, you have to dilute your thing until it’s tolerable (never mind appealing, even; just tolerable!) to everyone.
No rationalist organization can have everyone participate and remain a rationalist organization, because rationality is not appealing, nor even tolerable, to everyone.
The path forward is either “exclude most people” or “abandon all that is ‘rationalist’ about your group and what it does”.
And indeed this is what we see in practice.
But also, my experience is this doesn’t work either (in particular if your goal is “people show up every week.” People showing up every week is a lot, and you need to be offering them something they can’t get anywhere else for that. The groups I’ve seen attempt to go this route didn’t work either because they were too generic to matter.
You don’t necessarily have to have every individual person showing up every week, though, just often enough that the thing happens in aggregate. Choir manages weekly during concert season and biweekly the rest of the time! D&D groups often manage weekly. It’s still hard but it’s not, like, completely obviously impossible like “every person shows up every week”.
Two adjacent rooms, one only for members, the other for everyone (that’s where you drop off your spouse and kids).