I’ve seen a bunch of people dream of this sort of thing. I’ve formed a vague, ossified belief that this isn’t actually workable. It’d be cool to be proven wrong.
I think meeting once-a-week is just actually pretty hard to either enforce, or to provide enough value that people do voluntarily.
An argument that shifted me from “still trying to make something like this work somehow” to “giving up in my heart” was that while orthodox religions still are going strong in many places, liberal reform religions are losing membership. And this feels mechanically connected to what I’ve seen in the variants of this I’ve seen people attempt. The orthodox religions work because they actually constrain people, in a way that libertarian-ish rationalists really don’t like getting constrained. (note: I’m haven’t actually looked into this too carefully, and this is a crux. If it turned out a sizeable fraction of liberal reform religions were gaining membership I’d change my mind here)
That doesn’t mean I think community is doomed as an effort, I’m just skeptical of the “once-a-week, for everyone” that is modeled after a traditional congregation. I think solving community in the 21st century requires somehow filling a new niche in a new ecosystem.
I think I still agree that many of the ideas here, I mostly just think they should be pointed more at “figure out a new thing that will weather a changing world” than “try to replicate existing congregations.”)
Fleshing out the background anecdata informing my take here
(Note: I think I’m somewhat responding to a stereotype-of-an-idea in my head more than Maia’s post. I think I’m nonzero responding to Maia’s post itself, but regardless just taking the opportunity to say a bunch of stuff that feels relevant I don’t think I’ve written down before)
(note: these don’t all point in the same direction):
I absolutely have seen a bunch of meetups go well over the timescale of years, with dozens of people participating in a way that was a central facet of their lives. (I think Maia has run such meetups). So the thing I’m expressing skepticism is about not the general idea of a good meetup/community. It’s developing something more like a “congregation”, where a significant number of people and their families go every week.
On the flipside, most meetups seem to go through a lifecycle where there’s a few generations of “leaders with good vision” who make it go well, and eventually those people get what they wanted from being a leader and feel it’s time to move on to other things, and the people who replace them have some vision but not quite as much, and then eventually they get replaced by people who just sort of keeping a shambling shell of a thing going that feels less vibrant.
I think there’s a very small number of people who just earnestly want to keep running meetups their entire life (Maia seems like such a person fwiw), who are also good at it. I think there’s probably enough such-people that it’s possible to build a long-lasting thing here, but, like, the density of such things isn’t high enough to support everyone who wants such a congregation.
I’ve seen a few attempts at intentional community where people commit to participating reliably at events that are aimed specifically at fostering closeness. (
Will Eden’s Tribe. (which went well, but eventually reached a point where people felt like it just wasn’t providing enough meaning to be worth the commitment, and disbanded. I think it lasted a year?)
A few group houses aimed at intentional closeness (I think 2 of these included kids). One of them ended disappointingly early, one ended after a few years (intentionally), I think 2 vaguely petered out over time. I think I know of one of them that’s still going.
I helped run Sunday Assembly NYC, a more typical “atheist congregation”, which started out with 200 attendees, but gradually dwindled. I had thought “I’ve had a good track record running the NYC rationalist group, I should be able to help make this thrive”, but the skills didn’t transfer. It turns out I was able to make rationalists excited to be part of something. But neither I, nor the other 4 SANYC organizers, were able to make something that felt like it was really alive. Everyone showing up seemed to be showing up in the hope that some kind of “real congregation” would emerge, but it never did.
Watching the NYC ethical culture society slowly age and die, without being able to attract new blood because of the cultural/vibe mismatch between what resonated for the older crowd and the younger crowd. And it seemed like this also plays out in, like, quaker meetings I’ve been to (although I’d defer to Maia on how prevalent that is)
By contrast, some US Sunday Assemblies are still alive and kicking. (I think LA, Mountain View, and Atlanta). The Atlanta one in particular I’ve heard about playing roles in people’s lives that feel similar to what NYC rationality community was for me. It seemed like Atlanta-in-particular “benefited” from being in the Bible Belt, where the people attending didn’t have any other option for finding an intellectual community that resonated with them.
I’ve observed that Berkeley-in-particular has a weird mix of “in some sense it feels like a more comprehensive village” but also has weird internal dynamics that make it hard to have one centralized community thing. (This doesn’t seem like it applies to most other city’s communities though)
I think I’ve seen a couple people start explicit “church” things, and my sense is they start for awhile and then just… don’t really provide the value people are hoping to get from it and peter out.
It’s pretty common for people to try one type of meetup they haven’t tried before, go “this is amazing!” and try doing it every week or month, and then find that actually it just isn’t worth repeating that often. (either because they actually wanted the novelty, or they desperately wanted some nutrient, but then they’ve got it, and they don’t need it again for a few months). I think “try out ‘rituals’” is a subset of this. People go to Solstice and are like “oooh man what if this was every week?” but actually people just don’t want that every week, and not enough people event want it every month for it to feel the same.
All of that adds up to:
I think it’s totally possible to have a meetup that is actively great for a few years, and then is at least decent after it settles into it’s longer term configuration.
I think it’s a mistake to target ‘be a church’ rather than ’do something that feels alive to you that you and others find value in.” If you have a particular vision for being a church, maybe lean that way, but I would only do that if you, like, “feel the calling” and if other people do too.
Most of the plan in the above post still seems like a decent plan, since it’s sort of “start with ‘being a good meetup’, and layer some additional things on top to improve it.” I think the thing I’m saying is something more like “I would be aiming the stuff conceptually in a slightly different direction that the post seems to be aimed at.”
Staring at your points, I keep thinking about Mosaic House. Mosaic House was a group house in Boston that ran weekly dinner parties for a year. After six months, they usually had a couple dozen people show up for a random Friday night. Sometimes they had an activity or a topic but the magic ingredients seemed to be that it was the same time, same place. The couple of times they canceled, they still had people show up who hadn’t read the cancellation. Mosaic was great, and only stopped when the group house couldn’t renew their lease.
I’m going to loosely go point by point- not objecting but musing- but I’d be interested in dialoguing about this with you if you’d be up for that.
I don’t think you need the same people to go every week. If I imagine a group of fifty people, each of whom goes to half the meetups every month, that’s more than enough to have a feeling of familiar faces and it’s more than enough consistency for community to exist.
I’m actually pretty excited about mediocre organizers here. I think same time same place and then a solid C+ on the basics (announce the events, have snacks around, have seats and space to mingle, don’t be too hard to travel to) can get a regular crowd. That plus a five minute reading from a script means the group has actual common knowledge. You don’t need ambitious visionaries doing new things as long as you can draw from something exciting. To use churches as an example, you don’t need a pastor capable of writing a holy book and a dozen hymns, because it’s easy to print more copies of the bible and the hymnal.
Group closeness is a little anti-inductive. Aspiring to being best friends seems hard, but aspiring to be warm acquaintances seems doable by just putting people in the same room every week or two and eating together?
I don’t know enough about Sunday Assembly to add anything here.
I don’t know enough about NYC Ethical Society to add anything here.
See 4
You’d know more about Berkeley’s internal dynamics than I would.
I see people start actual churches and they’re still going generations later. I agree with the statistics on overall church attendance declining; I didn’t find a new church when I moved to Boston. I’m interested in how much of this could be mitigated by pointing people at the community wherever they moved away; like, when rationalists move from Boston to NYC or NYC to SF or Boston to Berlin, sometimes they find the local ACX chapter and show up for some meetups.
Some things people don’t want that often, but you don’t need everyone every week, you want people to come often enough they group is full of familiar faces and people can assume some common knowledge. Putting on a whole solstice every week seems hard and like it overfills that particular nutrient, but services can be more like half an hour. “Reading we always do, song we always do, reading that’s new this week, song that’s new this week, The Road To Wisdom, you’re done and the open social is in the room that way” seems fine. Alternately, if it’s a variety issue rotating through four different meetup types every month seems doable.
The thing that’s alive to me is shaped more like a dojo than a church, but I think the bones of both of them (same time, same place, same people) are pretty similar.
Importantly, I think lots of different things can hang on those bones in a way that’s mutually beneficial. To use the church as an example, once you know people are going to be there at that time in that place, you get people saying “it’d be nice to have a book club, but when? Oh, how about the hour before the sermon in the side room?” “Thanks for loaning me that pie tin- I had some spare apples so I baked you an apple pie, why don’t we do a pot luck after the sermon?” “It’d be fun to play soccer. Oh, hey, I’ve got a soccer ball in my car- how about we play on the green by the church after the pot luck?”
counterpoint: I run a weekly meetup in a mid-size Canadian city and I think it’s going swimmingly. It is not trivial to provide value but it is also not insurmountably difficult: I got funding from the EA Infrastructure Fund to buy a day off me per week for running meetups and content planning, and that’s enough for me to create programming that people really like, in addition to occasional larger events like day trips and cottage weekends. 8-12 people show up to standard meetups, I’d say around 70% are regulars who show up ~weekly and then you have a long tail of errants. Lots of people move away since it’s a university town, but when they visit they make sure to come to a meetup and catch up.
re: constraining, filling a new niche, etc—i feel like your POV is a bit doomered and this is pretty easy for a rationalist meetup to do—just enforce rules for good discourse norms and strongly signal that any topic is allowed as long as the dialogue remains constructive. make it a safe space for the people that will run their mouths in favor of the truth even if it kills the vibe at other parties and everyone else is glaring daggers at them, and people will show up. They’ll show up because they can’t get a community like that anywhere else in the city, as long as the city in question isnt in the bay area :P
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”.
I’d push back against the notion of this not being possible, instead I’d just say that it’s extremely challenging and will likely fail most of the time. Convincing people to come every week is a big commitment. Most people only have one or two or maybe three weekly slots, so this involves beating out a lot of other things. The standard for persuading people to commit isn’t good, but amazing. So, humanly possible, but you need to be exceptional.
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.
It seems to me that once a week would be good for highly motivated members (and perhaps a very successful community would make many members motivation, but we are not there yes), and for others, maybe once a month.
Or perhaps, there should be a formal meetup once a month, announced publicly, and an informal meetup once a week (except for the week with the formal meetup), announced privately.
I’ve seen a bunch of people dream of this sort of thing. I’ve formed a vague, ossified belief that this isn’t actually workable. It’d be cool to be proven wrong.
I think meeting once-a-week is just actually pretty hard to either enforce, or to provide enough value that people do voluntarily.
An argument that shifted me from “still trying to make something like this work somehow” to “giving up in my heart” was that while orthodox religions still are going strong in many places, liberal reform religions are losing membership. And this feels mechanically connected to what I’ve seen in the variants of this I’ve seen people attempt. The orthodox religions work because they actually constrain people, in a way that libertarian-ish rationalists really don’t like getting constrained. (note: I’m haven’t actually looked into this too carefully, and this is a crux. If it turned out a sizeable fraction of liberal reform religions were gaining membership I’d change my mind here)
That doesn’t mean I think community is doomed as an effort, I’m just skeptical of the “once-a-week, for everyone” that is modeled after a traditional congregation. I think solving community in the 21st century requires somehow filling a new niche in a new ecosystem.
I think I still agree that many of the ideas here, I mostly just think they should be pointed more at “figure out a new thing that will weather a changing world” than “try to replicate existing congregations.”)
Fleshing out the background anecdata informing my take here
(Note: I think I’m somewhat responding to a stereotype-of-an-idea in my head more than Maia’s post. I think I’m nonzero responding to Maia’s post itself, but regardless just taking the opportunity to say a bunch of stuff that feels relevant I don’t think I’ve written down before)
(note: these don’t all point in the same direction):
I absolutely have seen a bunch of meetups go well over the timescale of years, with dozens of people participating in a way that was a central facet of their lives. (I think Maia has run such meetups). So the thing I’m expressing skepticism is about not the general idea of a good meetup/community. It’s developing something more like a “congregation”, where a significant number of people and their families go every week.
On the flipside, most meetups seem to go through a lifecycle where there’s a few generations of “leaders with good vision” who make it go well, and eventually those people get what they wanted from being a leader and feel it’s time to move on to other things, and the people who replace them have some vision but not quite as much, and then eventually they get replaced by people who just sort of keeping a shambling shell of a thing going that feels less vibrant.
I think there’s a very small number of people who just earnestly want to keep running meetups their entire life (Maia seems like such a person fwiw), who are also good at it. I think there’s probably enough such-people that it’s possible to build a long-lasting thing here, but, like, the density of such things isn’t high enough to support everyone who wants such a congregation.
I’ve seen a few attempts at intentional community where people commit to participating reliably at events that are aimed specifically at fostering closeness. (
Will Eden’s Tribe. (which went well, but eventually reached a point where people felt like it just wasn’t providing enough meaning to be worth the commitment, and disbanded. I think it lasted a year?)
A few group houses aimed at intentional closeness (I think 2 of these included kids). One of them ended disappointingly early, one ended after a few years (intentionally), I think 2 vaguely petered out over time. I think I know of one of them that’s still going.
I helped run Sunday Assembly NYC, a more typical “atheist congregation”, which started out with 200 attendees, but gradually dwindled. I had thought “I’ve had a good track record running the NYC rationalist group, I should be able to help make this thrive”, but the skills didn’t transfer. It turns out I was able to make rationalists excited to be part of something. But neither I, nor the other 4 SANYC organizers, were able to make something that felt like it was really alive. Everyone showing up seemed to be showing up in the hope that some kind of “real congregation” would emerge, but it never did.
Watching the NYC ethical culture society slowly age and die, without being able to attract new blood because of the cultural/vibe mismatch between what resonated for the older crowd and the younger crowd. And it seemed like this also plays out in, like, quaker meetings I’ve been to (although I’d defer to Maia on how prevalent that is)
By contrast, some US Sunday Assemblies are still alive and kicking. (I think LA, Mountain View, and Atlanta). The Atlanta one in particular I’ve heard about playing roles in people’s lives that feel similar to what NYC rationality community was for me. It seemed like Atlanta-in-particular “benefited” from being in the Bible Belt, where the people attending didn’t have any other option for finding an intellectual community that resonated with them.
I’ve observed that Berkeley-in-particular has a weird mix of “in some sense it feels like a more comprehensive village” but also has weird internal dynamics that make it hard to have one centralized community thing. (This doesn’t seem like it applies to most other city’s communities though)
I think I’ve seen a couple people start explicit “church” things, and my sense is they start for awhile and then just… don’t really provide the value people are hoping to get from it and peter out.
It’s pretty common for people to try one type of meetup they haven’t tried before, go “this is amazing!” and try doing it every week or month, and then find that actually it just isn’t worth repeating that often. (either because they actually wanted the novelty, or they desperately wanted some nutrient, but then they’ve got it, and they don’t need it again for a few months). I think “try out ‘rituals’” is a subset of this. People go to Solstice and are like “oooh man what if this was every week?” but actually people just don’t want that every week, and not enough people event want it every month for it to feel the same.
All of that adds up to:
I think it’s totally possible to have a meetup that is actively great for a few years, and then is at least decent after it settles into it’s longer term configuration.
I think it’s a mistake to target ‘be a church’ rather than ’do something that feels alive to you that you and others find value in.” If you have a particular vision for being a church, maybe lean that way, but I would only do that if you, like, “feel the calling” and if other people do too.
Most of the plan in the above post still seems like a decent plan, since it’s sort of “start with ‘being a good meetup’, and layer some additional things on top to improve it.” I think the thing I’m saying is something more like “I would be aiming the stuff conceptually in a slightly different direction that the post seems to be aimed at.”
Staring at your points, I keep thinking about Mosaic House. Mosaic House was a group house in Boston that ran weekly dinner parties for a year. After six months, they usually had a couple dozen people show up for a random Friday night. Sometimes they had an activity or a topic but the magic ingredients seemed to be that it was the same time, same place. The couple of times they canceled, they still had people show up who hadn’t read the cancellation. Mosaic was great, and only stopped when the group house couldn’t renew their lease.
I’m going to loosely go point by point- not objecting but musing- but I’d be interested in dialoguing about this with you if you’d be up for that.
I don’t think you need the same people to go every week. If I imagine a group of fifty people, each of whom goes to half the meetups every month, that’s more than enough to have a feeling of familiar faces and it’s more than enough consistency for community to exist.
I’m actually pretty excited about mediocre organizers here. I think same time same place and then a solid C+ on the basics (announce the events, have snacks around, have seats and space to mingle, don’t be too hard to travel to) can get a regular crowd. That plus a five minute reading from a script means the group has actual common knowledge. You don’t need ambitious visionaries doing new things as long as you can draw from something exciting. To use churches as an example, you don’t need a pastor capable of writing a holy book and a dozen hymns, because it’s easy to print more copies of the bible and the hymnal.
Group closeness is a little anti-inductive. Aspiring to being best friends seems hard, but aspiring to be warm acquaintances seems doable by just putting people in the same room every week or two and eating together?
I don’t know enough about Sunday Assembly to add anything here.
I don’t know enough about NYC Ethical Society to add anything here.
See 4
You’d know more about Berkeley’s internal dynamics than I would.
I see people start actual churches and they’re still going generations later. I agree with the statistics on overall church attendance declining; I didn’t find a new church when I moved to Boston. I’m interested in how much of this could be mitigated by pointing people at the community wherever they moved away; like, when rationalists move from Boston to NYC or NYC to SF or Boston to Berlin, sometimes they find the local ACX chapter and show up for some meetups.
Some things people don’t want that often, but you don’t need everyone every week, you want people to come often enough they group is full of familiar faces and people can assume some common knowledge. Putting on a whole solstice every week seems hard and like it overfills that particular nutrient, but services can be more like half an hour. “Reading we always do, song we always do, reading that’s new this week, song that’s new this week, The Road To Wisdom, you’re done and the open social is in the room that way” seems fine. Alternately, if it’s a variety issue rotating through four different meetup types every month seems doable.
The thing that’s alive to me is shaped more like a dojo than a church, but I think the bones of both of them (same time, same place, same people) are pretty similar.
Importantly, I think lots of different things can hang on those bones in a way that’s mutually beneficial. To use the church as an example, once you know people are going to be there at that time in that place, you get people saying “it’d be nice to have a book club, but when? Oh, how about the hour before the sermon in the side room?” “Thanks for loaning me that pie tin- I had some spare apples so I baked you an apple pie, why don’t we do a pot luck after the sermon?” “It’d be fun to play soccer. Oh, hey, I’ve got a soccer ball in my car- how about we play on the green by the church after the pot luck?”
counterpoint: I run a weekly meetup in a mid-size Canadian city and I think it’s going swimmingly. It is not trivial to provide value but it is also not insurmountably difficult: I got funding from the EA Infrastructure Fund to buy a day off me per week for running meetups and content planning, and that’s enough for me to create programming that people really like, in addition to occasional larger events like day trips and cottage weekends. 8-12 people show up to standard meetups, I’d say around 70% are regulars who show up ~weekly and then you have a long tail of errants. Lots of people move away since it’s a university town, but when they visit they make sure to come to a meetup and catch up.
re: constraining, filling a new niche, etc—i feel like your POV is a bit doomered and this is pretty easy for a rationalist meetup to do—just enforce rules for good discourse norms and strongly signal that any topic is allowed as long as the dialogue remains constructive. make it a safe space for the people that will run their mouths in favor of the truth even if it kills the vibe at other parties and everyone else is glaring daggers at them, and people will show up. They’ll show up because they can’t get a community like that anywhere else in the city, as long as the city in question isnt in the bay area :P
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).
I’d push back against the notion of this not being possible, instead I’d just say that it’s extremely challenging and will likely fail most of the time. Convincing people to come every week is a big commitment. Most people only have one or two or maybe three weekly slots, so this involves beating out a lot of other things. The standard for persuading people to commit isn’t good, but amazing. So, humanly possible, but you need to be exceptional.
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.
It seems to me that once a week would be good for highly motivated members (and perhaps a very successful community would make many members motivation, but we are not there yes), and for others, maybe once a month.
Or perhaps, there should be a formal meetup once a month, announced publicly, and an informal meetup once a week (except for the week with the formal meetup), announced privately.