In the secular society we favor individuals over communities so much that those individuals often complain about not having a community at all. Coordination is famously hard. So maybe a certain degree of prioritizing a community is a good thing, to overcome the free-rider problem. It seems to me that many people who wish they had a community would refuse to help if someone else volunteered to create one. How much of that is something they would endorse on reflection, and how much is just a reflex?
The easiest way to avoid becoming a cult is not to have a community at all.
I think a good lesson that probably many people need to hear is that everything has a cost, some work needs to be done, so if you want to have a community, you should volunteer to do the necessary but boring stuff. Otherwise there will be no community.
“we”, which is to say “rationalists”, should not be a “community”.
So maybe a certain degree of prioritizing a community is a good thing, to overcome the free-rider problem.
The problem with prioritizing a community strikes me as similar to the problem of allowing doublethink. Yes, both can be helpful in the moment, if done at the right time, because they allow us to overcome fundamental flaws and inefficiencies in our cognition.
But they’re both insidious parasites that worm their way in and fight back hard if you ever try to remove them. When you choose to doublethink, the bias you embrace not only affects the topics you meant for it to, but also clouds your judgement when you try to determine if you ever want to stop doublethinking. So you run a heavy risk of entering a one-way door, where the person that comes out on the other side looks like you, sounds like you, feels like you, but is constrained to never want to walk back out again.
Likewise, when you empower a community to have control over individuals that goes beyond what’s entirely epistemically justifiable (maybe, for example, because the latter doesn’t result in sufficiently effective coordination), it’s very, very hard to ever disempower it, when things go astray. Because it starts fighting back in precisely those epistemically unjustifiable ways (like weaponizing biases and emotions that cloud the judgement and overcome reason, etc.) that make the entire edifice very, very dangerous.
As I have said before, the biggest danger with giving power to anyone, within a certain set of constraints, isn’t that they will use this power to enact unwise policies. It’s that they will use the power to remove the constraints.
This is tricky. Different people want different degrees of community, but even “give everyone the exact degree that they desire” wouldn’t make everyone happy, because those who want a lower degree might resent feeling excluded by those who have a higher degree. :(
Then the tech of our day can possibly help us! If social media provided asymmetric visibility so that everyone would get seemingly community that they want...
(should not be implemented before solving other issues, like how to make the resulting information bubbles harmless)
I don’t think the former is possible without the latter. As I observe the people around me, the community they truly, deeply (in the core of their hearts) want is precisely one that validates them and their feelings and all their beliefs. They crave precisely those information bubbles that you want to eliminate.
In the secular society we favor individuals over communities so much that those individuals often complain about not having a community at all. Coordination is famously hard. So maybe a certain degree of prioritizing a community is a good thing, to overcome the free-rider problem. It seems to me that many people who wish they had a community would refuse to help if someone else volunteered to create one. How much of that is something they would endorse on reflection, and how much is just a reflex?
The easiest way to avoid becoming a cult is not to have a community at all.
I think a good lesson that probably many people need to hear is that everything has a cost, some work needs to be done, so if you want to have a community, you should volunteer to do the necessary but boring stuff. Otherwise there will be no community.
And as some have always said:
The problem with prioritizing a community strikes me as similar to the problem of allowing doublethink. Yes, both can be helpful in the moment, if done at the right time, because they allow us to overcome fundamental flaws and inefficiencies in our cognition.
But they’re both insidious parasites that worm their way in and fight back hard if you ever try to remove them. When you choose to doublethink, the bias you embrace not only affects the topics you meant for it to, but also clouds your judgement when you try to determine if you ever want to stop doublethinking. So you run a heavy risk of entering a one-way door, where the person that comes out on the other side looks like you, sounds like you, feels like you, but is constrained to never want to walk back out again.
Likewise, when you empower a community to have control over individuals that goes beyond what’s entirely epistemically justifiable (maybe, for example, because the latter doesn’t result in sufficiently effective coordination), it’s very, very hard to ever disempower it, when things go astray. Because it starts fighting back in precisely those epistemically unjustifiable ways (like weaponizing biases and emotions that cloud the judgement and overcome reason, etc.) that make the entire edifice very, very dangerous.
As I have said before, the biggest danger with giving power to anyone, within a certain set of constraints, isn’t that they will use this power to enact unwise policies. It’s that they will use the power to remove the constraints.
This is tricky. Different people want different degrees of community, but even “give everyone the exact degree that they desire” wouldn’t make everyone happy, because those who want a lower degree might resent feeling excluded by those who have a higher degree. :(
Then the tech of our day can possibly help us! If social media provided asymmetric visibility so that everyone would get seemingly community that they want...
(should not be implemented before solving other issues, like how to make the resulting information bubbles harmless)
I don’t think the former is possible without the latter. As I observe the people around me, the community they truly, deeply (in the core of their hearts) want is precisely one that validates them and their feelings and all their beliefs. They crave precisely those information bubbles that you want to eliminate.