I cannot imagine participating in this community for any length of time and sincerely concluding that the mental state you’ve described is actually universal.
a_different_face
Karma: 29
For obvious reasons, I’m extremely curious to hear your analysis if you’re willing to share. (Feel free to PM me.)
Probably this is going to be too blunt, but it’s honest, and I’m assuming you’d prefer that:
Basically, because you are psychotic, not an asshole (or at least, afaict, only an asshole as a consequence). And dealing with people who are behaving poorly because of mental issues is a hard problem, especially in a community where so many people have mental issues of one sort or another.
Again, this doesn’t mean I disagree with you (and again neither have I claimed to agree). The fact of your psychosis is not obviously prior to your beliefs. But it is very obviously prior to how you have acted on those beliefs. Or at least it is obvious to me, having spent a great deal of time with friends who behave like you’ve behaved (in public, at any rate; of course you should discount this evidence given that I haven’t interacted with you in person, or at least not much).
Even if you think the throwaway’s rudeness and hostility makes them terrible, does it really make sense for guilt-by-association to propagate to anyone the throwaway approves of for any reason?
It’s evidence, yes.
I think it would be less cruel and more honest to just advocate for punishing people who believe a claim, rather than to advocate for punishing people who argue for the claim while simultaneously insisting that this isn’t a punishment for the belief. What would be the point of restricting speech if the goal isn’t to restrict thought?
… This is a much larger conversation for another time. If you have not already internalized “just because I believe something is true does not make it socially acceptable for me to go around trying to convince everyone else that it’s true”, I don’t know that I will be able to briefly explain to you why that is the case.
Ah, thanks. Turns out I do know who you are and have already thought about the question of why (and to what extent) the community continues to interact with you to my satisfaction. (And yes, the throwaway’s description of you is somewhat misleading, though mostly that’s because, from their behavior, I would expect anyone they praise to be terrible without redeeming features).
This is about behavior, not belief.
I have not disputed “autogynephilic men with repressed femininity and a crossdressing fetish pretending to be women aren’t actually women”, though neither have I affirmed it.
Regardless, I still would not want you, personally, in any community I’m part of, because your behavior is bad. I’m not interested in debating this this; obviously we disagree on what acceptable behavior looks like. Whatever; different strokes for different folks—clearly this community is not for you, but also you seem to still be here, for some reason.
And I would still want to know who’s going around trying to convince people of that statement, so that I could avoid them (for their proselytizing, not for their beliefs) and/or assess why the community has not yet shunned them. (Obviously you can shun the community while it simultaneously shuns you. These are not mutually exclusive.)
So, again, I still want to know who you’re talking about. Who are you talking about?
A specific other person intuitively sounds better to me, but that might just be because that’s how it has been done in organizations I’ve been in. (Though it sounds hard to schedule if it’s not a specific person, otherwise, and it’s important that this be a regular thing with the specific topic of “talk about how things are going”, not just general spending time together.) Maybe your second in command, maybe a different person from the command structure—I assume there’s going to be people other than you with roles like “general household management” (I am thinking of office managers, if you’re familiar).
I don’t think the pair time accomplishes quite this. Having a specific time set aside for one-on-one meetings specifically as the regular opportunity to bring up issues means issues which might otherwise have stayed at the back of the mind get brought up more. Generic time spent together does not accomplish this. It’s approximately the same reason you want scheduled one-on-one meetings with everyone in the house despite presumably spending a lot of time with the people in the house in other contexts.
despite the efforts of a very valiant man, people have still not realized that autogynephilic men with repressed femininity and a crossdressing fetish pretending to be women aren’t actually women
Being only on the periphery of the community, I’m extremely curious who said valiant man is (full disclosure: this is so I can avoid them and/or assess why the community has not yet shunned them, as I would hope they’d shun you).
This is a neat idea!
I expect it to fail. And I kind of wish you wouldn’t try: I give maybe a 1⁄4 chance this fails sufficiently dramatically and publicly that I become less willing to be associated with the community because people start associating it with that failure.
In particular, here is what I expect to happen (~60% confidence it goes down something like this):
Someone will start regularly defecting within the first three months. Maybe they don’t keep up with their chores, maybe they skip meetings, maybe they fail to get along with someone and they fight, maybe they persist in doing something they’ve been asked repeatedly not to do, maybe they chafe under your leadership and start practicing malicious compliance. I don’t expect intentional defection so much as executive dysfunction, to be clear, but it has the same effect either way.
You, personally, will lack the force of character or charisma to fix it. (I haven’t met you in person, so this might be way off; I’m just going off your writing and those of your pictures on Facebook I can see. But it takes an extraordinarily good manager to deal with this problem, and there’s nothing in your bio which implies you are one.) You also, not being legally their military superior, won’t have any actually worthwhile carrots or sticks to offer—this is the core problem, as I see it, that you lack the legal authority to properly enforce anything. Also, rationalists are weird, and often don’t respond that well to the usual incentives.
The rest of the house will lose confidence in your leadership as a consequence.
Bad things. I don’t actually know what happens at this step—people move out, or just stop playing by your rules and it reverts to a standard if unusually dysfunctional group house, or what.
Unfortunately I don’t have fixes to offer you here, other than “try to figure out an enforcement mechanism which will work even on rationalists and which you can legally carry out”. I can’t think of such an enforcement mechanism, but haven’t even put a full five minutes into it. Maybe you already have one in mind and I’ve missed it. To be clear, I don’t think “ostracism” will be remotely sufficient, because of the aforementioned weirdness and the fact that people will have other friends to fall back on. (I guess you could only invite people without other friends, or require them to cut off contact with said friends, but that is a terrible idea.) I also want to say that I’ve seen a number of other communities either fail or struggle due to lack of an explicitly specified and actually effective enforcement mechanism for their rules.
Tiny side note: I think it’s very important that members have regular one-on-one meetings with someone other than you, in case their problems are problems with you which they aren’t willing to bring up to your face.
Sure. And we do put relatively more emphasis. But we have not completely and totally thrown away all social convention. Nor should we: much of it exists for good reason.